There is a growing recognition of Levinas's importance. It can in part be attributed to an increasing concern that twentieth-century continental philosophy seems to have no place for ethics. In making ethics fundamental to philosophy, rather than a problem to which we might one day return, Levinas transforms continental thought. The book brings together some of the most interesting and far-reaching responses to the work of Levinas, in three different areas: contemporary feminism, psychotherapy, and Levinas's relation to other philosophers. It (...) includes a newly translated paper by Levinas on suffering, and a specially commissioned interview. (shrink)

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as (...) skills but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

From the ferment of recent debates about the intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood develop an approach they call 'regulative epistemology', exploring the connection between knowledge and intellectual virtue. In the course of their argument they analyse particular virtues of intellectual life - such as courage, generosity, and humility - in detail.

"Among the foremost Catholic philosophers of his generation. He has utilized the fullness of the Catholic intellectual tradition to brilliantly take the measure of modern philosophical thought... This volume is an expression of Robert Wood's singular philosophical outlook." -Jude Dougherty, dean emeritus, school of philosophy, The Catholic University of America.

Out of the ferment of recent debates about the intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood have developed an approach they call 'regulative epistemology'. This is partly a return to classical and medieval traditions, partly in the spirit of Locke's and Descartes's concern for intellectual formation, partly an exploration of connections between epistemology and ethics, and partly an approach that has never been tried before. Standing on the shoulders of recent epistemologists - including William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, Ernest Sosa, and Linda (...) Zagzebski - Roberts and Wood pursue epistemological questions by looking closely and deeply at particular traits of intellectual character such as love of knowledge, intellectual autonomy, intellectual generosity, and intellectual humility. Central to their vision is an account of intellectual goods that includes not just knowledge as properly grounded belief, but understanding and personal acquaintance, acquired and shared through the many social practices of actual intellectual life. This approach to intellectual virtue infuses the discipline of epistemology with new life, and makes it interesting to people outside the circle of professional epistemologists. It is epistemology for the whole intellectual community, as Roberts and Wood carefully sketch the ways in which virtues that would have been categorized earlier as moral make for agents who can better acquire, refine, and communicate important kinds of knowledge. (shrink)

A Society of the Friends of Difference would have to include Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Saussure, Freud, Adorno, Heidegger, Levinas, Deleuze, and Lyotard among its most prominent members.

Newman’s view of the heart corresponds with the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church. His motto, Cor ad cor loquitur, exhibits his central religious preoccupation. There are three factors involved in religious existence: intellectual apprehension, emotional realization, and moral action. The center, located in the heart, is typically considered secondary: clear conception and moral action are all that is required. For Newman, this is truncated religion, for religion has its deepest root in the heart. Here is where he considers conscience. (...) Like taste and common sense, it is an intellectual virtue; but unlike the former, it is always emotional. It is a privileged place of relation to God, the Supreme Judge. A peculiar set of emotional matters cluster around this relation. It plays in relation to the work of intellect as theology in relation to devotion. This exhibits an instance of the larger relation between notional and real assent. The latter deals with concrete matters and is a relation of “the whole person.” Its aim is to realize what we already accept. That may occur organically through experience, but it can also be invoked meditatively in solitude. Imagination is the chief vehicle of that realization. (shrink)

Some of the most interesting works in virtue ethics are the detailed, perceptive treatments of specific virtues and vices. This chapter aims to develop such work as it relates to intellectual virtues and vices. It begins by examining the virtue of intellectual humility. Its strategy is to situate humility in relation to its various opposing vices, which include vices like arrogance, vanity, conceit, egotism, grandiosity, pretentiousness, snobbishness, haughtiness, and self-complacency. From this list vanity and arrogance are focused on in particular. (...) Humble persons are not distinguished from arrogant persons by being unaware of or unconcerned with entitlements; rather, they lack the arrogance that entails a specific kind of motivation called ‘ego-exalting potency’. Humble people are motivated by pure interests regarding entitlements given their ability to serve as means to some valuable purpose or project. The chapter ends by considering a wide variety of ways intellectual humility can promote the acquisition of epistemic goods. (shrink)

Examining select high points in the speculative tradition from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger, _Placing Aesthetics_ seeks to locate the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of each thinker's philosophy. In Professor Robert Wood's study, aesthetics is not peripheral but rather central to the speculative tradition and to human existence as such. In Dewey's terms, aesthetics is “experience in its integrity.” Its personal ground is in “the heart,” which is (...) the dispositional ground formed by genetic, cultural, and personal historical factors by which we are spontaneously moved and, in turn, are inclined to move, both practically and theoretically, in certain directions. Prepared for use by the student as well as the philosopher, _Placing Aesthetics_ aims to recover the fullness of humanness within a sense of the fullness of encompassing Being. It attempts to overcome the splitting of thought, even in philosophy, into exclusive specializations and the fracturing of life itself into theoretical, practical, and emotive dimensions. (shrink)

Kant was one of the inventors of anthropology, and his lectures on anthropology were the most popular and among the most frequently given of his lecture courses. This volume contains the first translation of selections from student transcriptions of the lectures between 1772 and 1789, prior to the published version, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, which Kant edited himself at the end of his teaching career. The two most extensive texts, Anthropology Friedländer and Anthropology Mrongovius, are presented here (...) in their entirety, along with selections from all the other lecture transcriptions published in the Academy edition, together with sizeable portions of the Menschenkunde, first published in 1831. These lectures show that Kant had a coherent and well-developed empirical theory of human nature bearing on many other aspects of his philosophy, including cognition, moral psychology, politics and philosophy of history. (shrink)

At the turn of the century Martin Buber arrived on the philosophic scene... The path to his maturity was one long struggle with the problem of unity- in particular with the problem of the unity of spirit and life; and he saw the problem itself to be rooted in the supposition of the primacy of the subject-object relation, with subjects "over here," objects "over there," and their relation a matter of subjects "taking in" objects or, alternatively, constituting them. But Buber (...) moved into a position which undercuts the subject-object dichotomy and initiates a second "Copernican revolution" in philosophical thought. (shrink)

The notion of the heart is one of the most basic notions in ordinary language. It is central to Heidegger’s notion of thought that he relates to the primordial word Gedanc as underlying attunement that issues forth in emotional phenomena. He plays with all the etymological cognates of that word to zero in on the phenomena involved. The key experience of Erstaunen that grounds the first beginning of philosophy is paralleled by Erschrecken that grounds Heidegger’s “second beginning” and plays counterpoint (...) with the first. Along with Befindlichkeit as one’s basic attunement, these are key phenomena that belong to the heart, not to ‘intellect’ or ‘will.’ Thinking in terms of the intellect is das rechnende Denken¸ thinking in terms of the heart, besinnliche Nachdenken. It is the latter that provides the “poetic-intellectual” experience for both the arts and philosophy in which such “world space” is created that even the ordinary appears extraordinary. (shrink)

Being Human is the fruit of many years teaching Philosophical Anthropology, conducting Phenomenological Workshops, and reading classic texts in the light of a reflective awareness of the field of experience. Being Human is intended to look to what is typically assumed but not examined in much of current philosophical literature.

Still wanting is a systematic examination of the various aspects of his analytic method which, collectively, give to his philosophy of language its ...

This new Major Work from Routledge is a five-volume collection of the key critical assessments of Amartya Sen, probably best known for his work on famine, human development and welfare economics. Sen is one of the few modern academics who has commanded much respect and recognition from across the intellectual spectrum. His work—for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998—simultaneously embraces social choice theory and economic development, thus breaking the barrier between mathematized ‘high theory’ and ‘real world’ economics. (...) With an introduction newly written by the editor that places the collected work in its intellectual and historical context, this collection is destined to be welcomed as an invaluable resource for both reference purposes and as a contribution to the study of Amartya Sen. (shrink)

Hayek's reputation has gone through a remarkable cycle. An eminent exponent of the Austrian theory of business cycles in the 1930s, he was worsted in the controversy over Keynes' _Treatise on Money_. Following this defeat, Hayek retreated into capital theory, an esoteric branch of economics in which few economists then took an active interest. He gave up economics altogether after the war and turned to psychology, political philosophy, philosophy of law and the history of ideas. However, in 1974 he won (...) the Nobel Prize and returned to mainstream economics as a leading critic of Keynesianism and an advocate of free banking as the answer to inflation. Today Hayek reigns supreme as the kind of moral philosopher and political economist that economics has not seen since Adam Smith. Also forthcoming in this series is _Paul A. Samuelson, 2nd Series_. (shrink)