The debate over encumbered versus unencumbered selves that characterized the dialogue between liberalism and republicanism did not end well. Neither side seemed enlightened by its encounter with the other, as it became increasingly difficult to pin down the differences between the sides, never more so than when Michael Sandel was violently agreeing with Richard Dagger. Drawing on the work of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, this essay argues that Sandel could have made a much stronger argument for his view (...) than he did. Sandel need not have conceded or concluded that encumbered selves are unable to choose freely. Freedom is a more subtle and complicated concept that either Sandel or Dagger recognize. (shrink)

The debate over encumbered versus unencumbered selves that characterized the dialogue between liberalism and republicanism did not end well. Neither side seemed enlightened by its encounter with the other, as it became increasingly difficult to pin down the differences between the sides, never more so than when Michael Sandel was violently agreeing with Richard Dagger. Drawing on the work of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, this essay argues that Sandel could have made a much stronger argument for his view (...) than he did. Sandel need not have conceded or concluded that encumbered selves are unable to choose freely. Freedom is a more subtle and complicated concept that either Sandel or Dagger recognize. (shrink)

Three questions arising from Aggleton & Brown's target article are addressed. (1) Is there any benefit to considering the effects of partial lesions of the anterior thalamic nuclei (AT)? (2) Do the AT have a separate role in the proposed extended hippocampal system? (3) Should perirhinal cortex function be restricted to familiarity judgements?

'Original and provocative . . . engagingly written. (C Fred Alford) counters Levinas's notorious obscurity with a goodly dose of transparency' - John Lechte, Macquarrie University Abstract and evocative, writing in what can only be ...

This paper is an insighful critique of the shareholder and stakeholder models of organizational purpose. The authors emphasize that both these models fail to serve as an adequate basis for explaining the purpose of an organization and are unable to capture a fuller meaning of living in an organizational community. The paper thus endeavours to introduce into the mainstream of discussion a third model, based on the idea of the common good which draws inspiration from the communitarian Catholic tradition. The (...) first part of this paper traces the idea of common good as it relates to organizations. The second part engages the common good tradition with the shareholder and stake holder models. The paper goes on to describe common good within the organization through three propositions: fundamentality, excellence and integration. The authors reiterate, however, that the idea of the common good does not provide a micro-blueprint for managers, but rather an orientation or moral compass that directs organizational activity towards human development. (shrink)

Perception of a property (e.g. a colour, a shape, a size) can enable thought about the property, while at the same time misleading the subject as to what the property is like. This long-overlooked claim parallels a more familiar observation concerning perception-based thought about objects, namely that perception can enable a subject to think about an object while at the same time misleading her as to what the object is like. I defend the overlooked claim, and then use it to (...) generate a challenge for a standard way of thinking about the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation. Put informally, that view holds that just as we can mislead others by saying something false, illusory experience misleads by misrepresenting how things stand in the world. I argue that we ought to abandon this view in favour of some radical alternative account of the relationship between visual experience and rational belief formation. (shrink)

Pautz has argued that the most prominent naive realist account of hallucination—negative epistemic disjunctivism—cannot explain how hallucinations enable us to form beliefs about perceptually presented properties. He takes this as grounds to reject both negative epistemic disjunctivism and naive realism. Our aims are two: First, to show that this objection is dialectically ineffective against naive realism, and second, to draw morals from the failure of this objection for the dispute over the nature of perceptual experience at large.

Bertrand Russell was neither the first nor the last philosopher to engage in serious theorizing about propositions. But his work between 1903, when he published The Principles of Mathematics, and 1919, when his final lectures on logical atomism were published, remains among the most important on the subject. And its importance is not merely historical. Russell’s rapidly evolving treatment of propositions during this period was driven by his engagement with – and discovery of – puzzles that either continue to shape (...) contemporary theorizing about propositions, or ought to do so. Russell’s creative responses to these puzzles also laid the foundation for many later accounts (most obviously, contemporary ‘Russellian’ accounts of propositions). In this entry we provide an opinionated overview of Russell’s influential treatment of propositions, with a focus on the evolution of his views from 1903 to 1919. A growing secondary literature is dedicated to Russell’s changing views during this period, and their often complex or opaque motivations. We do not intervene overmuch in this ongoing scholarly discussion. Instead, our aim is to trace some of the central motivations for Russell’s evolving views, and highlight the extent to which these motivations remain relevant to contemporary theorizing about propositions. (shrink)

Written across the disciplines of art history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and theology, the ten essays comprising the collection all insist on multidimensional definitions of evil. Taking its title from a moment in Shakespeare's Tempest when Prospero acknowledges his responsibility for Caliban, this collection explores the necessarily ambivalent relationship between humanity and evil. To what extent are a given society's definitions of evil self-serving? Which figures are marginalized in the process of identifying evil? How is humanity itself implicated in the production (...) of evil? Is evil itself something fundamentally human? These questions, indicative of the kinds of issues raised in this collection, seem all the more pressing in light of recent world events. The ten essays were originally presented at the First Global Conference on Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, held in March 2000 in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. (shrink)

A selection of speeches and essays from the author's second decade as president of Yale University.

How best to avoid the Levinas Effect, as it has been called, the tendency to make Emmanuel Levinas everything to everyone? One way is to demonstrate that Levinas's thinking does not fit into any of the categories by which we ordinarily approach political theory. If one were forced to categorize Levinas's political theory, the term "inverted liberalism " would come closest to the mark. As long, that is, as one emphasizes the term "inverted" over "liberalism." Levinas's defense of liberalism is (...) likely the strangest defense the reader has encountered. We should, argues Levinas, foster and protect the individual because only the individual can see the tears of the other, the tears that even the just regime cannot see. The individual is to be fostered and protected for the sake of the other individual. Whether this has anything to do with "real" liberalism, and whether it should, is the topic of this essay. (shrink)

"This is one of the most significant contributions to Locke studies in the twentieth century.

Thinking through the body: educating for the humanities -- The body as background -- Self-knowledge and its discontents: from Socrates to somaesthetics -- Muscle memory and the somaesthetic pathologies of everyday life -- Somaesthetics in the philosophy classroom: a practical approach -- Somaesthetics and the limits of aesthetics -- Somaesthetics and Burke's sublime -- Pragmatism and cultural politics: from textualism to somaesthetics -- Body consciousness and performance -- Somaesthetics and architecture: a critical option -- Photography as performative process -- Asian (...) ars erotica and the question of sexual aesthetics -- Philosophy as awakened life : everyday aesthetics of embodiment in American transcendentalism and Japanese Zen practice -- Somatic style. (shrink)

Our awareness of the boundedness of the spatial sensory field—a paradigmatic structural feature of visual experience—possesses a distinctive epistemic role. Properly understood, this result undermines a widely assumed picture of how visual experience permits us to learn about the world. This paper defends an alternative picture in which visual experience provides at least two kinds of non-inferential justification for beliefs about the external world. Accommodating this justification in turn requires recognising a new way for visual experience to encode information about (...) the world. Reflection upon the epistemic contribution of sensory experience's structural features thus forces us to revise our understanding of how perception, cognition, and the world fit together. (shrink)

This paper defends a version of the old empiricist claim that to think about unobservable physical properties a subject must be able to think perception-based thoughts about observable properties. The central argument builds upon foundations laid down by G. E. M. Anscombe and P. F. Strawson. It bridges the gap separating these foundations and the target claim by exploiting a neglected connection between thought about properties and our grasp of causation. This way of bridging the gap promises to introduce substantive (...) constraints on right accounts of perception and perception-based thought. (shrink)

Most whistleblowers talk as if they never had a choice about whether to blow the whistle. This doesn't mean they acted suddenly, or impulsively, only that they believe they could not have done otherwise. Trying to make sense of this near universal answer to the question "Why did you do it?" the essay draws on narrative theory. Narrative theory distinguishes between actant and sender—that is, between actor and his or her values. This distinction helps to explain what it means to (...) face a difficult choice over something about which one feels one never had a choice. (shrink)

Despite wide acceptance that the attributes of living creatures have appeared through a cumulative evolutionary process guided chiefly by natural selection, many human activities have seemed analytically inaccessible through such an approach. Prominent evolutionary biologists, for example, have described morality as contrary to the direction of biological evolution, and moral philosophers rarely regard evolution as relevant to their discussions. -/- The Biology of Moral Systems adopts the position that moral questions arise out of conflicts of interest, and that moral systems (...) are ways of using confluences of interest at lower levels of social organiation to deal with conflicts of interest at higher levels. Moral systems are described as systems of indirect reciprocity: humans gain and lose socially and reproductively not only by direct transactions, but also by the reputations they gain from the everyday flow of social interactions. -/- The author develops a general theory of human interests, using senescence and effort theory from biology, to help analye the patterning of human lifetimes. He argues that the ultimate interests of humans are reproductive, and that the concept of morality has arisen within groups because of its contribution to unity in the context, ultimately, of success in intergroup competition. He contends that morality is not easily relatable to universals, and he carries this argument into a discussion of what he calls the greatest of all moral problems, the nuclear arms race. (shrink)

Most recent accounts of will-power have tried to explain it as reducible to the operation of beliefs and desires. In opposition to such accounts, this paper argues for a distinct faculty of will-power. Considerations from philosophy and from social psychology are used in support.

Most individuals realise that we have a moral obligation to avoid the evils of war. But this realization raises a host of difficult questions when we, as responsible individuals, witness harrowing injustices such as ""ethnic cleansing"" in Bosnia or starvation in Somalia. With millions of lives at stake, is war ever justified? And, if so, for what purpose? In this book, Richard J. Regan confronts these controversial questions by first considering the basic principles of just-war theory and then applying (...) those principles to historical and ongoing conflicts. Part One presents two opposing viewpoints: first, that war is not subject to moral norms and, second, that war is never morally permissible. The author rejects both perspectives, and moves to define the principles of just-war theory. He evaluates the roles of the president, Congress and, most importantly, the UN Security Council in determining when long-term US military involvement is justified. The moral limits of war conduct and the moral problem of using, or threatening to use, nuclear weapons are also discussed. On the just cause to wage war, Regan argues that defense of nations and nationals - whether in self-defense or in defense of others - remains the ""only"" classical cause that in the modern world would justify resorting to war. With respect to military intervention in secessionist and revolutionary wars, he contends that such intervention might be justified, but that prudence dictates extreme caution. In considering acceptable war conduct, Regan elaborates the specific principle of discrimination and proportionality; he maintains that civilians uninvolved in the enemy's war should not be directly targeted and that the costs of military action must be proportionate to the anticipated benefits of destroying military targets. The second part of the book presents case studies of eight historical wars - World War I, the Vietnam War, the Falklands War, the revolution and civil war in Nicaragua, the civil war in El Salvador, the Gulf War, the intervention in Somalia, and the Bosnian War - and poses several provocative questions about each. It invites readers and students to apply just-war principles to complex war-related situations and to understand the factual contingencies involved in moral judgements about war decisions. The book should be of particular interest to students of the moral issues of international relations and to readers interested more generally in philosophy, theology and political science. (shrink)

This book gives a descriptive analysis of specific Madhyamika texts. It compares the ideology of Kumarajiva (a translator of the four Madhyamika treatises 400 A.D.) with the ideologies of the three Chinese contemporaries - HuiYuan, Seng-Jui and Seng-Chao. It envisages an intercultural transmission of religious and philosophical ideas from India to China.

VAN MOSSEL C, ALFORD M and WATSON H. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 278–289 Challenges of patient‐centred care: practice or rhetoric.

For some time now a number of critics have argued that Juergen Habermas has misinterpreted Freud. The gist of this criticism is that Habermas' interpretation of psychoanalysis as `depth hermeneutics' must violate the intent of Freud's work, which is so deeply grounded in drive theory. In other words, Habermas confuses philosophical reflection with psychoanalysis. This paper takes a somewhat different focus. It examines the consequences of Habermas' interpretation of Freud for Habermas' view of the individual. It is shown that Habermas' (...) interpretation eventuates in an abstract and shadowy view of the individual. It is argued that an alternative view of psychoanalysis, object relations theory, can help locate the source of Habermas' pale view of the individual, and help correct it, without succumbing to `neo-Freudian revisionism'. Object relations theory also suggests that in order to overcome the diminution of the individual in real life it is necessary for political theory to examine seriously the role of the family. Finally, object relations theory generates an interesting criticism of so-called postmodern psychoanalysis—for example, the work of Jacques Lacan. This criticism can help us better understand the relationship between Habermas and modernism. (shrink)

C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students in order to discover how people experience evil -- in themselves, in others, and in ...

In this review of Leon Kass’s Life, liberty and the defense of dignity and Deryck Beyleveld and Roger Brownsword’s Human dignity in bioethics and biolaw. I consider the prospects for a theory of dignity as a basis for bioethics research. I argue that dignity theories are worth exploring in more detail, but that research needs to consider both “antitheory” accounts of the language of bioethics, and to give more weight to accounts of dignity as an outcome of holding positive liberties (...) and as something that has a psychological dimension. (shrink)

In this investigation of the contemporary notion of evil, C. Fred Alford asks what we can learn about this concept, and about ourselves, by examining a society where it is unknown--where language contains no word that equates to the English term "evil." Does such a society look upon human nature more benignly? Do its members view the world through rose-colored glasses? Korea offers a fascinating starting point, and Alford begins his search for answers there.In conversations with hundreds of (...) Koreans from diverse religions and walks of life--students, politicians, teachers, Buddhist monks, Confucian scholars, Catholic priests, housewives, psychiatrists, and farmers--Alford found remarkable agreement about the nonexistence of evil. Koreans regard evil not as a moral category but as an intellectual one, the result of erroneous Western thinking. For them, evil results from the creation of dualisms, oppositions between people and ideas.Alford's interviews often led to discussions about imported ways of thinking and the impact of globalization upon society at large. In particular, he was struck by how Koreans' responses to globalization matched Westerners' views about evil. In much of the world, he argues, globalization is the ultimate dualism--attractive for the enlightenment and freedom it brings, terrifying for the great social and personal upheaval it can cause. (shrink)

The self is a topic that crosses a great many disciplinary boundaries; concepts of the self are central to political science, psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, and classical studies. In this book, C.Fred Alford sets forth a psychoanalytic account of the self and applies it to texts by Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rawis, and Rouseau in order to draw out their implicit, often inchoate, assumptions about the self.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists by Chris VoparilRichard Kenneth AtkinsChris Voparil. Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 377. Hardback, $74.00.A house divided cannot stand, or so Jesus tells us. As far as I can ascertain, Jesus was right about many things (his followers perhaps less so). Accordingly, that the house early pragmatists built, (...) with all of its subsequent divisions and internecine controversies, still stands is something of an anomaly. Perhaps it is explained by the fact that pragmatists have also been blessed by peacemakers, among whom Chris Voparil is to be numbered. In this carefully researched and clearly written book, Voparil examines the ties that bind Richard Rorty to his pragmatist predecessors: C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams. The hope animating Voparil's book is that with a closer look at these ties he "can unsettle the current map of opposing pragmatist camps by uncovering previously obscured or overlooked alignments and common aims" (259). He argues that Rorty did not misunderstand his predecessors but "consciously radicalized" (280) their positions.The book is five chapters long, with each of the chapters devoted to Rorty's relationship to one of the five aforementioned classical pragmatists, in that order. There are also substantial introductory and concluding chapters. The more controversy-laden chapters are the first (on Peirce) and third (on Dewey). As Voparil explains in chapter 1, Peirceans are wary of Rorty's apparent antirealism. But to soothe the worries of wary Peirceans, Voparil argues that commitments to realism can be found in Rorty's early and later works and that some of the more outrageous statements from the middle period are exaggerations that are ultimately qualified, if not disavowed. The Peirce scholar may wish that Voparil had done more to distinguish different varieties of realism found in Peirce's writings, as Robert Lane has done in his recent Peirce on Realism and Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), but the crux of Voparil's argument is persuasive enough. Rorty did not deny that there is a world that affects us and that there is such a thing as "getting it right," even if he thought that varieties of representationalism about mental states and the correspondence theory of truth are not topics worthy of further discussion. Voparil does not [End Page 530] cite the footnote, but Rorty states the matter sufficiently clearly when he writes, "I think that [Nelson] Goodman's trope of 'many worlds' is misleading and that we need not go beyond the more straightforward 'many descriptions of the same world' (provided one does not ask 'And what world is that?'). But his point that there is no way to compare descriptions of the world in respect of adequacy seems to me crucial, and in the first two chapters of this book [Ways of Worldmaking] he makes it very vividly" (Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], xlvii). Rorty's point is that talk of "the world" can play no interesting explanatory role in our accounts of truth, representation, and the like just because we cannot now (or at any given future time) claim to have the final vocabulary to talk about the world. There is an interesting parallelism to Peirce's theory of induction here that Voparil does not explore. On Peirce's theory of statistical induction, we cannot claim at any given time that we have ascertained the real frequencies in nature, but we can be assured that in the long run we will eventually approximate them. Similarly, for Rorty, we cannot claim at any given time that we have the final vocabulary for describing the world, but that does not prohibit us from claiming that we can improve our descriptions of the world, where improvement is relative to some purpose. As Rorty concedes, the descriptions of nature that emerge in the modern period are better descriptions than those of the Aristotelian physics, given various purposes that we have (Consequences of Pragmatism, 191).Turning to chapter 3, Rorty's misappropriations and misrepresentations of Dewey's views have peeved Dewey scholars. In particular, Rorty... (shrink)

The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he concludes that neither strategy works (...) well in today's world. More effective are the day-to-day coping practices of some survivors. Drawing on testimonies of survivors from the Fortunoff Video Archives, Alford also applies the work of Julia Kristeva and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot to his examination of a topic that has been and continues to be central to human experience. (shrink)