A process-based approach to archaeology combines traditional third-person data collection methods with first- and second-person inquiries. Drawing from the traditions of cognitive archaeology, transpersonal psychology, and ecopsychology, this mixed-methods approach can be thought of as a movement toward a more holistic or “integral” archaeology. By way of example, a prehistoric rock art site on Ometepe Island, Nicaragua is explored from the inside (through the researcher's lucid dreaming incubations) as well as in relationship with the researcher's embodied presence (an exploration of (...) environmental hermeneutics). These multiple perspectives can be seen to situate the researcher's worldview and biases within the context of the study as well as perhaps lead to new questions about the significance of these cognitive artifacts. (shrink)

The problem : commerce and corruption -- Smith's defense of commercial society -- What is corruption? : political and psychological perspectives -- Smith on corruption : from the citizen to the human being -- The solution : moral philosophy -- Liberal individualism and virtue ethics -- Social science vs. moral philosophy -- Types of moral philosophy : natural jurisprudence vs. ethics -- Types of ethics : utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics -- Virtue ethics : modern, ancient, and Smithean -- Interlude (...) : the what and the how of TMS VI -- The what : Sith's "practical system of morality" -- The how : rhetoric, audience, and the methods of practical ethics -- The how : the ascent of self-love in three stages -- Prudence or commercial virtue -- The challenge : from praise to prudence -- Educating the vain : fathers and sons -- Self-interest rightly understood -- The advantages and disadvantages of prudence -- Magnanimity or classical virtue -- The problems of prudence and the therapy of magnanimity -- Up from individualism : desert, praiseworthiness, conscience -- Modernity, antiquity, and magnanimity -- The dangers of magnanimity -- Beneficence or christian virtue -- Between care and caritas -- Benevolence and beneficence and the human telos -- The character and purposes of the wise and virtuous man -- Wisdom and virtue and Adam Smith's apology -- Epilogue: The "economy of greatness". (shrink)

"Fénelon is arguably the most neglected of all the major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet to now we have lacked a single interpretive monograph in English devoted specifically to his thought. This monograph aims to correct this by providing the first such book-length study. In focusing specifically on Fénelon's political thought, it has three primary aims. The first is to provide a reconstruction of Fénelon's political ideas accessible (...) to those who might be encountering Fénelon directly or at length for the first time. The second is to demonstrate the connections between Fénelon's political thought and several other fields to which he made significant and long-recognized contributions, including not only philosophy and political science but also economics, education, literature, theology, and spirituality. Third, the book aims to cut several new edges in our extant understanding and appreciation of Fénelon's political thought and its significance. On this front, it specifically argues that Fénelon is better understood as a moderate and modern thinker rather than as a radical or reactionary, and that Fénelon deserves to be seen not merely as a political thinker but as a political philosopher. Finally, The Political Philosophy of Fénelon argues for Fénelon's relevance to our political world today. Fénelon was a nuanced and insightful diagnostician of ills from egocentrism and social atomism to authoritarianism and imperialism, and our understanding of these phenomena so familiar to us today can benefit from attending to his insights"--. (shrink)

This essay examines Friedman's recent approach to the analysis of physical theories. Friedman argues against Quine that the identification of certain principles as ‘constitutive’ is essential to a satisfactory methodological analysis of physics. I explicate Friedman's characterization of a constitutive principle, and I evaluate his account of the constitutive principles that Newtonian and Einsteinian gravitation presuppose for their formulation. I argue that something close to Friedman's thesis is defensible.

Smith scholars have become interested of late in his thoughts on religion, and particularly the question of the degree to which Smith's understanding of religion was indebted to the influence of his close friend Hume. Until now this debate has largely focused on three elements of Smith's religious thought: his personal beliefs, his conception of natural religion, and his treatment of revealed religion. Yet largely unexplored has been one of the most important elements of Smith's thinking about religion: namely his (...) treatment of ‘the natural principles of religion’ in TMS 3.5. What follows aims to reconstruct this treatment and thereby shed light on what Smith might have meant by ‘the natural principles of religion’, and how he understood the relationship of religion and morality more generally – an understanding, it is argued, that significantly differs from Hume's, and reveals Smith to have been a critic of Hume's vision of the relationship of religion to morality, for all their agreements on other fronts. (shrink)

I examine two claims that arise in Brown’s account of inertial motion. Brown claims there is something objectionable about the way in which the motions of free particles in Newtonian theory and special relativity are coordinated. Brown also claims that since a geodesic principle can be derived in Einsteinian gravitation, the objectionable feature is explained away. I argue that there is nothing objectionable about inertia and that while the theorems that motivate Brown’s second claim can be said to figure in (...) a deductive-nomological explanation, their main contribution lies in their explication rather than their explanation of inertial motion. (shrink)

Franz Brentano's claim to fame is the reintroduction of intentionality to the modern philosophy of mind. Hickerson's book offers new interpretations of a central philosophical concept employed in the Brentano School, arguing against the now-standard misreading of Brentano as Immanentist. The History of Intentionality is a continuing history and will be valuable to present-day specialists and students in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind.

The negative emotions generated following stressful life events can increase one’s risk of depressive symptoms and promote higher levels of perceived stress. The process model of emotion regulation can help distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies to determine who may be at the greatest risk of worse psychological health across the lifespan. Heart rate variability may affect these relationships as it indexes aspects of self-regulation, including emotion and behavioral regulation, that enable an individual to dynamically adapt to the (...) changing demands of both internal and external environments. In this study, we expected individual differences in resting vagally mediated HRV to moderate the influence of emotion regulatory strategies among our sample of 267 adults. We found support for the hypothesis that higher vagally mediated HRV buffers against the typical adverse effects of expressive suppression when evaluating depressive symptoms and found weak support when considering perceived stress. There was no evidence for an interaction between cognitive reappraisal and vagally mediated HRV but there was a significant, negative association between cognitive reappraisal and depressive symptoms and perceived stress. Future work may determine if intervening on either emotion regulation strategies or HRV may change these within-persons over time. (shrink)

In response to cancer, patients may be thrown into precarious processes of remaking their purpose, identity, and connections to the world around them. Thoughtful and thorough responses to these issues can be supported by person-centered phenomenological approaches to caring for patients. The importance of perspectives on illness offered by theoretical phenomenology will become apparent through the example of the experience of nausea, or perhaps more accurately put—chemo sickness. The focus here is on how chemo sickness alters one's way of relating (...) to the world. I will examine the phenomenon of nausea through the lens of the phenomenological concept of mood—an existential feeling that engenders a diffused tone permeating through one's world and shapes the envisioned possibilities on one's horizon. (shrink)

This essay argues that the Phaedrus’s Palinode articulates an account of love (erōs) in which the experience of love can morally and intellectually transform both lover and beloved. After situating this account of love within the dialogue’s thematization of soul-leading (psuchagōgia), I show how Socrates’s account of love makes an intervention into typical Greek thought on pederasty and argue against Jessica Moss’s contention that soul-leading love suffers severe limitations in its soul-leading capacity, showing that Moss is wrong to think that (...) love can only efficaciously lead souls that are already well-formed. By contrast, the Palinode portrays the moral and intellectual formation of the lover, who first approaches the beloved in the spirit of rapacity only to be turned by his experience of beauty toward genuine service, ordered to the beloved’s benefit. The beloved likewise undergoes such a transformation as a result of his nascent return-love (anterōs). (shrink)

Although he did not invent the term, Jürgen Habermas has popularised “constitutional patriotism” as a form of political unity that avoids excessive nationalism. This paper attempts to examine the link between emotivism and normativity that has otherwise been excluded from Habermas’s notion of constitutional patriotism. Beyond Habermas, political theory as a whole has not yet taken emotivism as a serious component of normativity. Rather than developing it in isolation, this paper attempts to reconcile emotivism with cognitive-normative practices found within rational (...) deliberation. Reconciling the two not only provides a better normative steering component for judging good from bad practices, but also depicts contemporary political practices more accurately. In sum, constitutional patriotism’s normativity must be sourced from a complex integration of emotion and cognition, or put another way, from the interplay between citizens’ moral sentiments and rational judgements. (shrink)

This paper identifies experiential processes through which social structures become taken for granted, termed processes of “structure marginalization”. Passive processes of structure marginalization relegate social structures to the margin of experience without the use of higher-order cognitive acts such as evaluation and reflection. Examples include adapting to social structures via routine and habitual practices, a lack of conscious awareness of the complexity, historical formation, and other details of social structures, and rendering social structures irrelevant when they are unreflectively judged to (...) be of no value for achieving ends. Active processes of structure marginalization reflectively and discursively relegate social structures to marginal consciousness. Examples include the use of naturalistic and necessitarian explanations for the social order that implicitly justify it as inalterable or “just the way things are”, normative justifications for the status quo, and conscious awareness of one’s powerlessness to control social-structural conditions. Active processes of structure marginalization originate in passive processes. The goal of the typology is to explain, at the level of experience, why social structures typically remain unproblematic and unnoticed in everyday life, even during periods of social crisis and change or when existing structures produce harmful effects. (shrink)

As Josef Pieper writes in his study “On Hope,” the virtue of hope is the virtue that completes the human being in its intermediary, temporal state (the “status viatoris,” or condition of being “on the way”). To be human is always to be “on the way” toward a fulfillment and completion not yet available to it (the “status comprehensoris”). Those who are hopeful direct themselves toward this end as to their fulfillment despite recognizing that it, in some sense, exceeds their (...) grasp, whereas those who are not hopeful either reject the possibility of such a fulfillment (despair) or prematurely suppose themselves to have attained it (presumption). While Pieper’s account of hope is largely based on the theologically-inflected account found in Thomas Aquinas, Pieper draws his conception of the nature of philosophy and philosophical reasoning ultimately from Plato. Philosophy, for Plato, on Pieper’s view, is essentially structured by the “not yet” condition that Pieper calls the status viatoris, as we see mythically depicted in Diotima’s account of Eros as being an intermediary daimon who, partaking of his parents’ opposed natures, is fundamentally characterized by poverty and lack (the “not”) on the one hand and by resourcefulness (the “yet”) on the other. The human soul, erotic at its very core, is structured by this twofold relation to the object of its greatest longing, Beauty Itself, which it doesn’t yet possess but for which it strives with all of its being. In this essay, I show that Plato has a “hopeful” sense of reason on account of the erotic condition (the status viatoris) that essentially characterizes the human soul’s spatio-temporal life during its incarnate, earthly state. If reason is, for Plato, to be true to itself, it must strive for the whole of wisdom even as it lacks that wisdom. Because reason is directed toward a fulfillment it can’t quite fathom, it must relate to that fulfillment essentially in the mode of hope. When, by contrast, reason becomes presumptuous, thinking that it already has a clear and secure cognition of the truth for which it seeks, it becomes dogmatic and runs the risk of falling into the misology diagnosed in the Phaedo when it inevitably comes up against some crack in its understanding. Likewise, when reason succumbs to despair—as we see, for example, in Meno’s eristic argument about the impossibility of learning—it becomes excessively skeptical and inert. Only when reason avoids the twin errors of presumption and despair can it continue in its pursuit of the whole of wisdom while remaining mindful of its limitations. (shrink)

This interview with Bernard Stiegler’s long-time translator and collaborator, Daniel Ross, examines the connections between different periods of Stiegler’s work, thought, writing and activism. Moving from the three volumes of Technics and Time to the final large-scale collaborative project of The Internation, the discussion concentrates on Stiegler’s conceptualization of ‘protentionality’, hope and care for a world confronted by climate crises, entropy and computational economic reconfigurations of work, economy and imaginations for futural possibilities. The interview foreshadows the special issue on The (...) Internation project planned by Bishop and Stiegler for TCS that will appear in the near future. (shrink)

This paper advances an interpretation of what Hume called ‘the general rules’: natural principles of belief-formation that nevertheless can be augmented via reflection. According to Hume, reflection is, in part, what separates the wise from the vulgar. In this paper, I argue that for Hume being wise must therefore be, to some degree, voluntary. Hume faced a significant problem in attempting to reconcile his epistemic normativity, i.e. his claims about what we ought to believe, with his largely involuntarist theory of (...) the mind. Reflection on the General Rules, and an interpretation of that reflection as voluntary, helps explain not only Hume's theory of belief, but also how he hoped to reconcile epistemic normativity with naturalism about the mental. (shrink)

Origen of Alexandria can be credited as the founder of a Christian speculative angelology, in which Christ the Logos is both the creator and the interpreter of the angels. He introduces the angels as the first created rational beings who, in contemplating the divine Word (Logos), freely choose to direct their will as holy angels in service to or wicked demons in antagonism against the love of God. The first created rational beings are divided into three orders: the angels, the (...) demons, and the neutral spirits of human souls. The angels remain closest in contemplation of the Logos, yet, due to their negligence, descend to unfold in the angelic hierarchy. The angels and demons thereafter guide the movements of all spirits, substances, and signs in the created world. The neutral spirits of human souls can choose to follow either the guidance of guardian angels or demons. And yet after the Incarnation, the angels are distinguished from the demons by their choice to follow Christ. Origen’s angelology has often been regarded as an early Christian alternative to Middle Platonic daemonologies. And after Karl Barth, his angelology has come to be dispensed from Christian theology. However, as Jean Daniélou has observed, Origen had previously departed from Platonic daemonology in affirming that angelic mediacy must pass away like the light of the stars before the brilliance of the Logos of Christ. He had, in this way, already assimilated the mediacy of the angels to the absolute mediation of Christ. And, in assimilating angelic to christic mediacy, Origen also attributes the reason with which the world is moved to the divine reason of the divine Word (Logos) of Christ in God. Origen’s angelology can thus be read both before and after Barth as a science of the angels. (shrink)

To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping (...) arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction. (shrink)

Scholars of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy today tend to agree that Adam Smith, while deeply indebted to Hume, was also engaged in a comprehensive and creative transformation and extension of certain of Hume’s fundamental concepts. But what exactly did Smith take from Hume, and precisely how did he transform these concepts? This chapter traces Smith’s appropriation and transformation along five fronts: sympathy and humanity, justice and utility, judgment and impartiality, virtue and commercial society, and epistemology and religion. In so doing, it (...) aims to provide a synthetic account of previous scholarship on the Hume–Smith relationship and to supplement these accounts with an examination of several further points of contact that have yet to receive significant attention. (shrink)

Social norms are an important input for ethical decisions in any business context. However, the cross-cultural discovery of extant social norms presents a special challenge to international management because norms may be inscrutable to outsiders. This article considers the contribution of Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) to the analysis of social norms in business ethics. It questions the origins and dynamics of norms from a sociological perspective, and identifies a tension between prescriptive efforts to make norms obligatory and positivist accounts (...) that describe norms as evolving and unstable. In the presence of dynamic and incomplete norms, managers can either deliberate with stakeholders to make norms flexible or codify norms to make them rigid. This essay argues that deliberation is the only reliable method for anticipating emergent norms. (shrink)

ExcerptWhat would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is? For the world is deeply ailing. Theodor Adorno, “Regressions,” Minima Moralia1Unfortunately, for the last half century many critical theorists have disregarded the founder of Critical Theory: Max Horkheimer. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse's popularity largely concealed the rest of the Frankfurt School. Today, Horkheimer is seen as a tardy pessimist in the wake of Walter Benjamin2 and, much too often, as a footnote to Theodor Adorno's (...) genius. Even the quintessential statement of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment, has been…. (shrink)

: This paper advances an account of Twardowski as a representationalist. In particular, Twardowskian representationalism is a blend of what I call resemblance representationalism and mediator-content representationalism. It was not, I argue here, proxy-percept representationalism. Twardowski treated mental contents as "signs" or "quasi-pictures." Husserl was a well-known critic of this view. I additionally argue that Husserl's criticism is grounded in the claim that Twardowski conflated representational content with sensations. The distinction on which this Husserlian criticism rests is between the psychological (...) and ideal contents of consciousness, the cornerstone of the early Husserlian phenomenology. (shrink)

In this essay, I discuss the philosophical significance of three features of the Phaedrus’s dramatic scenery: the myth of Boreas, the two trees Socrates singles out upon arriving at the grove, and the grove itself. I argue that attention to these three features of the dramatic scenery helps us better understand the Phaedrus’s account of erōs.

At key moments in the Phaedrus and the Republic, Socrates qualifies our capacity to “see” the highest realities (the “place of being,” the “Good beyond being”) with the adverb “mogis” (mogis kathorosa, Phdr. 248a; mogis horisthai, Rep. 517b). Mogis can be used to indicate either the toilsome difficulty of some undertaking or the subject’s proximity to failing to accomplish the undertaking. Socrates uses mogis to qualify the nature of the human soul’s capacity to make the intellectual ascent and see the (...) divine, but it is not prima facie clear whether the qualification is meant to express (1) the difficulty we have in undertaking the intellectual ascent (a comment on the effort required) or (2) the fact that the human soul’s capacity to make the intellectual ascent will, on account of its limitations, only “just barely” be achieved, if at all. After discussing the uses of mogis in classical literature and surveying Plato’s uses of mogis across the corpus, I interpret Plato’s use of mogis at Phaedrus 248a, arguing that mogis kathorosa should be translated as “only gets a good look at the things that are with much toil” rather than the more common “scarcely able to gaze upon the things that are.” I then turn to the parallel passage at Republic 517b and argue against a prominent account, put forward by John Sallis, among others, of Plato’s understanding of divine inaccessibility. Whereas Sallis et al. argue that Plato’s use of mogis indicates that which is to be seen at the acme of the ascent is only “barely glimpsed” on account of the fact that it “withdraws” from our view, I argue instead that Plato’s use of mogis indicates that though we can “get a good look” at the highest realities, that good look is qualified by their inexhaustible excess. The human capacity to see the highest realities is qualified because there is “always more to see,” not because that which is there to be seen “withdraws” from view, and still less because there is some intrinsic limitation to human intellectual vision that prevents us from apprehending the highest realities. Accordingly, the divine is accessible but never exhaustible. (shrink)

Abstract:Adam Smith has long been celebrated as a polymath, and his wide interests in and contributions to each of the discrete component fields of PPE have long been appreciated. Yet Smith deserves the attention of practitioners of PPE today not simply for his substantive insights, but for the ways in which his inquiries into these different fields were connected. Smith’s inquiry was distinguished by a synthetic approach to knowledge generation, and specifically to generating knowledge with applications exportable to other fields. (...) Further, Smith’s investigations of various areas of study led him to recognize patterns in and across these fields, and his sensitivity to such patterns helped guide his inquiry and render it a connected enterprise. This paper examines several of Smith’s discrete inquiries in the history of astronomy, language, moral philosophy, and political economy, to show how he employed the techniques of pattern detection that he practiced in each of these inquiries to the task of generating new insights into new fields of inquiry. In so doing, Smith not only distinguished himself as an early practitioner of what we today identify with PPE, but he also provides a useful point of reference for those doing PPE today. (shrink)

The Hastings Center's chief advancement officer describes values and intellectual interests that undergird his work. “My job is itself collaborative in spirit,” Sauder writes. “My primary responsibility is to identify and build connections with a wide variety of people who value ethical decision‐making at the crossroads of health, science, and technology.”.

Learner Voice, Learner Choice offers fresh, forward-thinking supports for teachers creating an empowered, student-centered classroom. Learner agency is a major topic in today's schools, but what does it mean in practice, and how do these practices give students skills and opportunities they will need to thrive as citizens, parents, and workers in our ever-shifting climate? Showcasing authentic activities and classrooms, this book is full of diverse instructional experiences that will motivate your students to take an agile, adaptable role in their (...) own learning. This wealth of pedagogical ideas-from specific to open-ended, low-tech to digital, self-expressive to collaborative, creative to critical-will help you discover the transformative effects of providing students with ownership, agency, and choice in their learning journeys. (shrink)

Dieses Buch bietet die erste umfassende Auslegung von Schellings kontrovers beurteilter Schrift Philosophie und Religion. Ausgehend von Schellings Kunst der Darstellung und unter standiger Berucksichtigung der Einwande Eschenmayers, auf welche diese Schrift zu antworten sucht, zeichnet die Arbeit die Grundlinien von Schellings Denken um 1804 nach. Besonderes Gewicht liegt dabei auf Schellings Ansichten zu Freiheit, Ethik, Geschichte und Politik. Dabei zeigt sich, dass die Grundthesen der sogenannten Identitatsphilosophie, anders als allgemein angenommen, durchaus mit der Lehre der Freiheitsschrift vertraglich sind. Der (...) Autor versucht Philosophie und Religion als ein Dokument Politischer Philosophie lesbar zu machen, indem er aufzeigt, dass der politische Charakter des schellingschen Denkens nicht erst in einer ausgearbeiteten Theorie des Politischen zu suchen ist, sondern vielmehr bereits in der Form der Darstellung reflektiert ist, durch welche Schelling unterschiedlichen Adressaten Unterschiedliches mitzuteilen und einer politisch brisanten naturlichen Ungleichheit Rechnung zu tragen vermag. (shrink)

A sociological revision of Aron Gurwitsch provides a helpful layered theory of conscious experience as a four-domain structure: _the theme_, _the thematic field_, _the halo_, and _the social horizon_. The social horizon—the totality of the social world that is unknown, vaguely known, taken for granted, or ignored by the subject despite objectively influencing the thoughts and actions of the subject—, helps conceptualize how everyday human–computer interaction (HCI) can obscure social structures. Two examples illustrate the usefulness of this framework: (1) illuminating (...) new forms of social control known as “surveillance capitalism” that influence the other domains of consciousness despite being invisible to the subject and (2) explaining how computer use tends to “hide” the ecological impacts of digital-technological systems from the attention of subjects. A sociological four-domain theory of consciousness supplements ethnomethodological HCI research by preserving the field’s long-standing focus on micro-level interactions and user experience while simultaneously drawing attention to a “commonsense ignorance of social structure”—in this case, the invisibility of the social structures behind personal computer use. Social structure can be reproduced even when actors are unaware of engaging in its reproduction. (shrink)

Karl Barth's review of Franz Overbeck's posthumously edited volume, “Christentum und Kultur”, was part of a larger and ongoing episode of theological name-calling in the early 1920s, one that involved numerous other personal relationships, events, letter-correspondence, and intellectual resources. The full story remains untold, however, and assessments of Overbeck's influence on the Swiss theologian have been inconclusive. In this article, I contextualize Barth's review and argue that the primary impetus for his interaction was the identification of important counter-criticisms to the (...) charges and accusations he was receiving from various reviewers of the first Romans commentary, Adolf von Harnack in particular. Following an introduction to Overbeck's life and thought, I provide an exposition of Barth's review. This occasional work operated on multiple levels: as a summary, polemical, and constructive piece. While Overbeck generally corroborated Barth's emerging two-world eschatology, reinvigorated the time-eternity and God-man diastases, and encouraged his thinking about Urgeschichte, these themes were important secondarily as the basis for a more general attack against theological accommodationism and bourgeois religion. Whatever Barth finally understood or misunderstood about Overbeck's critical thought and interpretation of early Christianity, it was the attack itself by Overbeck and especially the criticisms he produced against shared “liberal” opponents that were the initial objects of Barth's curiosity. (shrink)

Durkheim’s claim in Suicide that humanity’s ‘inextinguishable thirst’ (soif inextinguible) causes suffering was adopted from Arthur Schopenhauer’s argument that the will-to-live’s ‘unquenchable thirst’ (unlöschbaren Durst) causes suffering, which was previously adopted from the Buddha’s argument that ‘ceaselessly recurring thirst’ (tṛṣṇā) causes suffering. This article retraces this demonstrable though seemingly unlikely history of ideas and reveals that the philosophical underpinnings of Durkheim’s theory of anomie are rooted, through Schopenhauer, whose thought influenced many thinkers during the Neo-Romantic fin de siècle period, including (...) Durkheim, in the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth – a doctrine made available to Schopenhauer in European translations of Buddhist texts during the previous turn of the century’s ‘Oriental Renaissance’. By achieving a more thorough understanding of the ambiguous concept of anomie through its Eastern intellectual origins, this project shows that the common conceptualization of anomie as ‘normlessness’ is inconsequential without presupposing that humans thirst and unconstrained thirst causes pain. (shrink)

Adam Smith has long been regarded as a champion of sympathy. More recently he has also been regarded as a critic of love. But how do these two sides of his thought cohere? This article argues that Smith’s defense of sympathy emerges directly out of and is indeed decisively shaped by his critique of love. Yet seeing this requires reconsidering what Smith understood love to be, as well as what he understood sympathy to be. What follows thus offers a reexamination (...) of Smith’s well-known treatment of eros alongside an examination of his underappreciated treatment of agape in order to argue for the claim that Smith’s theory of love is not simply a critique of eros for its particularity but also incorporates an appreciation of the attractions of the universality of agape. At the same time Smith ultimately judges agape insufficient as a remedy for eros, for however admirable its scope and ambitions may be, the realization of its ambitions, Smith thinks, is compromised by our natural epistemic limits. It is this recognition, I want to argue – and not his reservations towards eros alone – that leads Smith to regard sympathy as a central principle of motivation, and to embrace it as the best available means of replicating the practical benefits of universal charity within the confines of our epistemic limits. (shrink)

David Hume and Adam Smith are often regarded as founding fathers of modern social science and champions of self-interested material acquisitiveness. Against this view I argue that their moral and political philosophies are better understood as modern installments in the classical tradition of virtue ethics. By focusing on Hume and Smith's conception of self-love and particularly on their distinction of self-love from self-interest, I demonstrate their dedication to encouraging virtues beyond the instrumental virtues of the market. ;Hume and Smith regard (...) egoism as a natural and inescapable element of human nature, but they also believe that egoism is educable. Untrained egoism manifests itself in such basic forms of selfishness as vanity and ambition, but a properly educated and elevated egoism heightens our sensitivity to the well-being of others. Through a careful analysis of their dialectical rhetoric, I show how Hume and Smith educate the egoism of their readers in their moral works. By so doing I demonstrate that the Scots understood themselves not merely as advocates of the pursuit of wealth, but as moral educators aspiring to introduce their readers to a life beyond the furious pursuit of external goods. Their portraits of magnanimous statesmen and wise and virtuous sages serve as models of this higher life, a life distinguished by the pursuit of moral nobility through beneficent activity. By tracing the Aristotelian and Ciceronian origins of their understanding of the relationship of self-love to benevolence, I thus show that far from celebrating commercial self-interest and denigrating virtue, Hume and Smith draw on classical sources in their attempts to ennoble modern liberalism and encourage decency and respect for the dignity of others. And by focusing particularly on their conception of the proper magnanimity for modernity, that of the wise and virtuous man, I argue that Hume's and Smith's practical writings on history, politics and economics are best regarded as attempts to discharge the beneficent duties they describe in their moral philosophy, and thereby claim wisdom and virtue for themselves. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 4 Seiten: 380-404.

This reply to my five generous and insightful critics – Gianna Englert, David Williams, Alexandra Oprea, Geneviève Rousslière, and Brandon Turner – focuses on three key issues they raise: the relat...

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 105-119, March 2021.