In modern scholarship, Confucianism has only with some difficulty been placed among the religious traditions of the world, being viewed as more a form of humanism than religion. The question is revisited here whether Confucianism can be described as a religion by employing a definition of religion that focuses on both the identification of an Absolute and the transformation of the individual toward the Absolute. Arguing that the religious basis for the tradition can be found in the identification of an (...) Absolute, T'ien, Heaven, or T'ien-li, Principle of Heaven, this essay identifies sagehood as the transformative process that leads the individual toward the realization of its Absolute. (shrink)

Recent advances in medical technology have provided healthcare staff with the possibility of maintaining the life of a brain-dead pregnant woman on life-support in order to achieve a successful delivery of the foetus. Management of Post-Mortem Pregnancy examines the legal and ethical difficulties surrounding such post-mortem management.

"History and the Paradoxes of Metaphysics in" "Dantons Tod" is the first in-depth analysis exploring the dynamic relationship between Hegelian metaphysics and Georg Buchner's literary masterpiece. This study illuminates the fascinating paradoxes emerging from Buchner's portrayal of the collision of historical reality with the monumental concept of freedom developed in the monistic idealism of Hegel. It also brings to light much-neglected interconnections between Buchner's Hegelian reading of Spinoza and his theories on nature and history.".

This collection of essays, brings together essays from leading figures in the field of medical law and ethics. The compilation of articles undertaken by Prof. Sheila A.M. McLean, University of Glasgow, UK, address the key issues currently challenging scholars in the field.

This book is a critical, forward-looking, and multidisciplinary text. Its chief aim is to advance understanding of medical law by reference to both moral theory and the rapidly changing context in which medical law must operate. That context includes the impact of market forces and medical tourism, political interests, medical and professional interests, changing perceptions of medicine, developing technologies, limited resources, and the impact of increasingly direct (international and domestic) recognition of human rights.

This study is an investigation of the impact of Spinozan metaphysics on German-speaking writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In terms of specific works by Friedrich Schiller and C.F. Meyer, this influence has hitherto gone unnoticed. Though it has long been recognized that George Buchner was profoundly affected by Spinozism, in-depth treatments of this important dimension of his thought have, by and large, been lacking. This book contains an attempt to come to terms with significant aspects of Buchner's reception (...) of Spinoza, as found both in his literary and non-literary writings.". (shrink)

Are pregnant women entitled to the same rights of self-determination and bodily integrity as other adults? This is the fundamental question underlying recent highprofile legal interventions in situations when pregnant women and healthcare staff do not agree on management options or appropriate behaviour. Courts on both sides of the Atlantic have sometimes answered that they are not, and the law has at times been manipulated to enforce compliance with medical recommendations. This book offers a comprehensive assessment of healthcare law as (...) applied to the unique situation of pregnancy. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Nicholas of Cusa’s deployment of an omnivoyant image in the De visione Dei has been said to deconstruct Leon Battista Alberti’s mathematical determination of space in single-point linear perspective. While there has been some debate over whether the omnivoyant functions like a medieval icon or instead like a Renaissance painting, what has been neglected is a more careful analysis of what underlies the very structure of omnivoyance, namely the milieu from which its contradictions and paradoxes emerge. In this article, (...) I will show how thinking the milieu of vision, implicit in Cusa’s optics, lets us overcome any overly simple binaries in these debates and deepen our understanding of the meaning of omnivoyance. (shrink)

In addition to its interest as one of Plato's most brilliant dramatic masterpieces, the Protagoras presents a vivid picture of the crisis of fifth-century Greek thought, in which traditional values and conceptions of man were subjected on the one hand to the criticism of the Sophists and on the other to the far more radical criticism of Socrates. The dialogue deals with many themes which are central to the ethical theories which Plato developed under the influence of Socrates, notably the (...) nature of human excellence, the relation of knowledge to right conduct, and the place of pleasure in the good life. This translation of the Protagoras was originally published in 1976. In this revised edition, C. C. W. Taylor has made a number of changes in the translation and commentary, and has added a new Preface and Introduction. The Bibliography has also been extended to include titles published up to 1990. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics, Theory and the NovelLeon SuretteEthics, Theory and the Novel, by David Parker; x & 218 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, $54.95.David Parker’s stated purpose in Ethics, Theory and the Novel is to ground the value of “canonical works” of literature in the “ethical interest,” which each of them embodies in the meditation and exploration of “the clashes of moral value” (p. 38). He is self-consciously responding (...) to the strictures of neo-Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction which allegedly see “the canon simply as the repository of conservative values” and therefore reject it (p. 51). In order to demonstrate this capacity of imaginative literature Parker provides ethical analyses of scenes in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The book divides into two projects, since Parker also argues for the pertinence of ethics itself quite apart from the value of imaginative literature as a repository of serious ethical thought. Part one makes the theoretical case, and part two applies the theory.For the theory he takes as his champions Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, the late Australian critic, S. L. Golberg, and the Canadian political scientist, Charles Taylor. From Nussbaum he derives the claim that “literature can be moral philosophy” (p. 34). From Taylor he takes a triadic schema of Western [End Page 247] culture: Judeo-Christian-Kantian, Liberal-Enlightenment-rational, and Romantic-irrational-egoistic (p. 20) as the sources of our ethical thinking. Murdoch and Goldberg are deployed as predecessors in his own practice of ethical analysis of literary works. Parker’s claim is that imaginative literature exhibits the dynamic tensions of these conflicting ethical discourses.Parker’s discussion is intelligent and well-informed. His position is, in my view, perfectly defensible—indeed traditional. That said, this book seems to be as much a symptom of the malaise afflicting literary criticism as a cure. To this reader the theoretical portion is not faithful to any of his champions, but is a dog’s breakfast of “theoretical” postures gathered from Derrida, Cavell, de Man, Rorty, Foucault, and Frederic Jameson—as well as from those named above. The problem is not that Parker misunderstands or misrepresents their thought, but rather that he treats theoretical discourse as a flea market from which he can assemble pre-owned furniture for his own residence.The practice of literary criticism encourages such rummaging among other people’s belongings. It is appropriate for commentators on a literary work of art to select from previous commentary those observations and insights they regard as sound, and to reject or ignore those viewed as unsound. Nonetheless it is difficult to understand how a discourse which finds one leg in Marxist discourse, a second in Freudian, a third in phenomenological, and a fourth in Heideggerean or Derridean discourse can be expected to stand four square.Ethics, Theory and the Novel can be defended as an exercise in bricolage—and quite an impressive one in its own way. Like the handyman, Parker has cobbled together an ethicist criticism out of what is available or ready-at-hand in other discourses. But—as with many a home project—one can still see its flea market provenance. In his critical analysis of the novels, Parker shows himself to be a careful and perceptive reader. But I must confess that his ethical analyses seemed very like old-fashioned moral analysis of character motivation. I would not disagree with his claim that “an ethical vocabulary... is essential to the full understanding of the created fictional situation” (p. 191). However, his argument for a dialogic plurivocity in the ethical discourse of Western fiction is one that has been previously put by Mikhail Bakhtin from within Marxism. It is, I think, a serious oversight that Bakhtin is never mentioned—even though Parker’s position is distinguishable from Bakhtin’s in that his dialogue is between perennial ethical schemata and Bakhtin’s is between hegemonic and subversive discourses.Leon SuretteUniversity of Western OntarioCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Unlike many of the major figures in Western philosophy, Kierkegaard explores many issues of interest to feminist theorists today. Moreover, he does so in a style—labyrinthine, many-voiced, multilayered, adverse to authority—that adumbrates _écriture féminine_. A major question probed in the volume is whether Kierkegaard's writings are misogynist, ambivalent, or essentialist in their views of women and the feminine or whether, in some important and vital ways, they are liberatory and empowering for feminists and women trying to free themselves from the (...) maze of patriarchal constructs. The essays also show how the three existence-spheres—aesthetic, ethical, and religious—articulated in Kierkegaard's authorship inscribe different modalities of the sexual relation: seduction for the aesthetic, marriage for the ethical, and absence from commerce with the other sex for the religious. Contributors are Sylviane Agacinski, Wanda Warren Berry, Birgit Bertung, Jane Duran, Leslie A. Howe, Céline Léon, Tamsin Lorraine, Robert L. Perkins, Mark L. Taylor, Sylvia Walsh, and Julia Watkin. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.