In The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, Marcy P. Lascano holds up the metaphysical views of two early modern women philosophers alongside one another in order to demonstrate that...

The Term ‘liberty’ invokes such universal respect that most modern political economists and moralists endeavour to find a conspicuous place for it somewhere in their systems or prescriptions. But in view of the innumerable senses of this term an insistence on some kind of definition prior to any discussion seems to be justified. For our present purposes attention to two particularly conflicting interpretations will be sufficient. These are sometimes called the ‘negative’ and the ‘positive’ notions of Liberty. According to the (...) ‘negative’ notion, my own liberty implies the reduction to a minimum of the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I wish to act. Conversely the absence of liberty, or coercion, is regarded as undesirable because it amounts to the prevention by other persons of my doing what I want. On the other hand, the ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ consists in the attainment of self-mastery, or, in other words, the release from the domination of ‘adverse’ influences. This ‘slavery’ from which men ‘liberate’ themselves is variously described to include slavery to ‘nature’, to ‘unbridled passions’, to ‘irrational impulses’, or simply slavery to one's ‘lower nature’. ‘Positive’ liberty is then identified with ‘self-realisation’ or an awakening into a conscious state of rationality. The fact that it is contended that such a state can often be attained only by the interference of other ‘rational’ persons who ‘liberate’ their fellow beings from their ‘irrationality’, brings this interpretation of liberty into open and striking conflict with liberty in the ‘negative’ sense. (shrink)

The recent and ongoing refugee crisis in Europe highlights conflicting attitudes about the rights of migrants and refugees to health care in transition and destination countries. Some European and Scandinavian states, such as Germany and Sweden, have welcomed large numbers of migrants, while others, such as the U.K., have been significantly less open. In part, this is because of reluctance by certain national governments to incur what are seen as the high costs of delivering aid and care to migrants. In (...) response to these assumptions, some theorists have argued that the appropriate way to view the health needs of migrants is not in terms of rights, but in terms of the interests of destination and transition countries—and have argued that providing care to migrants and refugees will generate benefits for their host countries. However, self‐interest alone is less effective at motivating the provision of care for health deprivations that do not pose a threat to third parties, or to migrants and refugees in poor or distant countries. In this paper, I argue that while self‐interest is unlikely in itself to motivate the provision of all necessary health care to all migrants and refugees, and may risk stigmatizing already vulnerable persons, it can provide the foundation upon which such motivations can be built. My goal is therefore to show how and why a more just approach to the provision of health care to migrants can and should be derived from narrower, self‐interested commitments to preserving citizen health. (shrink)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the name of Adam Smith was popularly associated with the sort of ‘laissez faire’ policy that is expounded with all the fervour of a religious faith. Smith, so the story ran, in his eagerness to combat the excessive mercantilist government intervention of his day, had resorted to supra-natural claims in his general onslaught against central control and planning by governments. Such intervention was ‘unnatural’ and conflicted with Deistic Design. Only through private actions (...) could mankind reach satisfying and ‘natural’ fulfillment. Action through private self-interest was twice blessed; it. blessed him who profited and his fellows who were ‘profited from’. True there was a kind of central planning that was of supreme importance; but it had a divine origin and it worked not through governments but through individual free trade. Private actions in fact were directed by an Invisible Hand which brought society into a grand and spontaneous Natural Harmony. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a natural experiment involving academic cheating by university students. We explore the relationship of moral judgment to actual behavior, as well as the relationship between the honesty of students self-reports and the extent of cheating. We were able to determine the extent to which students actually cheated on the take-home portion of an accounting exam. The take-home problem was not assigned with the intent of inducing cheating among students. (...) However, the high rate of observed cheating prompted the instructor to return to class and ask the students to provide information on their motivation. The students' responses are the data analyzed in this natural experiment. We found that in a simple regression the relationship between moral judgment scores and cheating behavior was insignificant. However, when we tested whether including Utilizer scores affected the relationship of cheating and moral judgment we found that Utilizer affected the relationship significantly. Finally, we found that moral judgment and honesty were not related, but higher levels of cheating behavior related to less honesty. (shrink)

According to philosophical situationists, empirical psychology suggests that most people are not virtuous, and that we should be skeptical about the possibility of cultivating virtue. I argue against the second claim by offering an empirically informed model of character formation. The model begins with ancient formational wisdom emphasizing emotion education, the practice of spiritual exercises, self-monitoring, and willpower, and is confirmed, nuanced, and supplemented by insights from recent empirical psychology. Many ancient philosophers, recent social psychologists, and philosophers of emotion (...) agree that emotions are central to moral cognition. I defend a perceptual account of emotion, and show how this account suggests a practical upshot that empirical psychologists tend not to emphasize, but that the ancients would endorse: emotion education should be a primary focus of character formation. I dilate on this practical point using the remediation of inappropriate anger as a test case. Taking my remedial cues from the Stoic and Christian traditions, I argue that training the emotions through self-monitoring, willpower, and the use of “spiritual exercises”—practices of mind and body whereby one digests the doctrines of one’s philosophical school, so that those doctrines are not matters of mere notional understanding, but actually take up residence in one’s vision of the world—provides hope for meaningful movement in the direction of virtue. The rigorous practice of spiritual exercises involves difficult work. To have much success, the moral trainee will need at least the seeds of what I call “remedial virtues”: character excellences that enable an agent to do the demanding work of re-cultivating her character. The remedial virtues include self-vigilance and the virtues of willpower. I develop empirically informed philosophical analyses of self-vigilance and the virtues of willpower, and offer empirical evidence to support the claim that they can be cultivated. Then I show how the remedial virtues can help us resist temptation, leverage temptation in the interest of further growth in character, and correct for the subtle situational forms of moral interference that situationists emphasize. (shrink)

This inquiry illustrates how Peirce’s Energetic Interpretant facilitates consciousness-raising between sign users. Because it forces attention and progression of action, the Energetic Interpretant highlights perfective aspectual characteristics, namely atomistic/punctual cause-effect sign relations by featuring junctures between events: beginning, middle, end. For example, the stops and starts of events are influenced by the nature of the action, in addition to the agent’s idiosyncratic preferences and predilections. The Thirdness underlying it further perpetuates the punctual component present in action relations, operational when effort (...) produces resistance against an opposing force. Because effort can materialize physically, or internally, it demonstrates the continued primacy of Peirce’s categories in fostering certain consequences. Energetic Interpretants can inhibit, i.e., attention to one stimulus, while ignoring another. Nonetheless, consciously inhibiting/resisting a force introduces control beyond the self—another’s reflections upon the conscious acts of an agent. This influence between interlocutors satisfies Peirce’s maxim of a “common place to stand”, demonstrating mutual comprehension of the sign’s proper effect. In fact, Energetic Interpretants may result in an effect of such proportion upon either or both interlocutors that a habit-change materializes. As such, Energetic Interpretants epitomize the perfectivity exercised by particular efforts, intimating the likelihood of their discursive success. Inherent in punctual events is the element of surprise, which ultimately hastens the kind of habit-change especially exhibited in Peirce’s double consciousness —self talking to self or other. (shrink)

Women’s entry into the legal academy in significant numbers—first as students, then as faculty—was a 1970s and 1980s phenomenon. During those decades, women in law schools struggled: first, for admission and inclusion as individual students on a formally equal footing with male students; then for parity in their numbers in classes and on faculties; and, eventually, for some measure of substantive equality across various parameters, including their performance and evaluation both in and in front of the classroom, as well as (...) in the quality of their experiences as students and faculty members and in the benefits to be reaped from their tenure. This part of the story of women’s entry into the legal academy in the 1970s and 1980s—a story of attempted admission, then inclusion, then integration and assimilation, and then, finally, equality—is now a familiar one, at least in broad outline. It is not, in its entirety, an uplifting story. According to a raft of articles produced by women law students in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, women law students during those decades participated less in the classroom, were called on and responded to differently when they did participate, suffered from more law-school-induced anxiety disorders and other mental health issues, graduated with lower GPAs and less law review experience, published fewer notes and filled fewer editorial positions on those journals, held fewer leadership positions overall while in law school, and had far more difficulties connecting with mentors, teachers, and would-be recommenders among the faculty than male students. Women law professors during those decades were tenured at significantly lower rates than men and, particularly at high prestige schools and at schools with fewer female faculty among the tenured ranks, were hired at lower rates that did not reflect their number in the pool of qualified applicants, had trouble asserting or maintaining authority in the classroom or being perceived as having authority, taught lower-prestige courses and received low teaching evaluations, and, like their students, were published far less frequently in the major and most prestigious law reviews. Much of this, albeit not all, has not changed much for either students or faculty. As women in law schools enter the posttenure and midcareer phase, many of the old problems persist while new ones appear: women faculty are invited to participate on panels less often than men, and both women students and faculty are underrepresented as authors in law reviews. Although gender-neutral parental leave is now available to faculty at most law schools, many such policies are still ad hoc. There is considerable worry, although no hard evidence, over whether men disproportionately use the time off to write rather than care for children. Women are still disproportionately overrepresented in some fields and underrepresented or unrepresented in others, and those fields correlate in unsurprising ways with levels of prestige: the more women in a field, the less prestigious. As elsewhere in the workforce, women faculty in legal education suffer from sexual harassment, most of which is unremedied. Women still suffer a pay gap in law schools that remains unaddressed at most universities, as it does elsewhere in academia. There is a sizeable literature on these depressing phenomena that stubbornly do not seem to abate. In these comments, however, I want to focus on another, less appreciated, part of the story of women’s entry into the legal academy in the 1970s and 1980s: the emergence of a body of scholarship—sometimes called feminist legal theory—produced by some of these women legal scholars over the same time period. The story I want to focus on, in other words, is not that of second- or third-wave women’s struggles within the academy, either for admission, acceptance, assimilation, or equality in law schools. Rather, this Article focuses on the story of the scholarship some of those second-wave assimilated women produced once they got there. Feminist jurisprudence, understood largely as scholarship on issues pertaining to gender equality, was launched in the 1970s, endures today, and continues to shape debates. Feminist legal theory, however, was in effect a subfield within feminist jurisprudence and, as its name implies, was an attempt to fashion a broad- based theoretical account of the relationship of law in liberal legal regimes to women’s subordination, patriarchy, and gender and sexual inequality— particularly in a post–civil rights era, when women enjoyed broad access to rights of formal equality, reproductive liberty, and liberal antidiscrimination law. Feminist legal theory so understood—a body of scholarship in search of a theoretical understanding of the relation of law to women’s subordination or, more simply, of law and patriarchy—was birthed in the 1970s, nurtured in the 1980s, and matured in the 1990s. I suggest in this Article that it is now seemingly in decline, and may soon disappear altogether. The reasons for this trajectory, I believe, are to date unexplored. Some reasons are fairly self-evident. Feminist legal theory was a product of three time-specific factors peculiar to the 1970s and 1980s: it reflected the political and the legal struggles of second-wave feminism. The critical theory schools were, to varying degrees, present or thriving in the academy in the 1970s and 1980s, within which feminist legal theory was birthed, grew, and then coexisted with critical theory, albeit at times very uneasily; and this feminist theory reflected second-wave women faculty and students’ mixed experiences of assimilation, success, and alienation in law schools themselves, as briefly recited above. Those three factors—the background politics, the presence of critical theory in law schools, and the differences in women’s experience of those schools—are all themselves either disappearing or dissipating in felt urgency, albeit in different ways and at different speeds, and that dissipation clearly is a part of the story of feminist legal theory’s decline. There are other reasons for its decline as well, however. Some are internal to feminism and feminist theory, and some pertain to the changing nature of legal scholarship from the 1980s to the present. I explore these reasons in Part II below. The story of the development of a distinctively feminist legal theory during the 1970s through the 1990s, and the story of its decline in the 2000s, is of obvious relevance to the history of second- and third-wave feminism. It should also be of interest for what it reveals about the nature of legal scholarship as it was understood, received, and produced in those decades. Its decline likewise reveals something about the changing nature of legal scholarship and the legal academy today. Thus, one conclusion I draw is that the feminist legal theory of the 1970s through the 1990s—regardless of the truth or lasting power of its claims—stands as an example of a type of legal scholarship that was somewhat distinctive to those decades. That form of legal scholarship, furthermore, likely can only emanate from the legal academy. For a host of reasons, we are currently in danger of losing this entire genre of intellectual work, which would be the polity’s loss, not just feminism’s or the legal academy’s. (shrink)

Cognitive psychologists have uncovered a number of natural tendencies to systematic errors in thinking. This paper proposes some ways that intellectual character virtues might help correct these sources of epistemic unreliability. We begin with an overview of some insights from recent work in dual-process cognitive psychology regarding ‘biases and heuristics’, and argue that the dozens of hazards the psychologists catalogue arise from combinations and specifications of a small handful of more basic patterns of thinking. We expound four of these, and (...) sketch how they conspire to produce the myriad biases, heuristics, and illusions. We then offer accounts of two character virtues—self-vigilance and intellectual vitality—and explain how these virtues could help correct our error-prone thinking. The self-vigilant person appreciates her vulnerability to natural epistemic defects, is on the watch for cues to the working of these possible error-makers, and intelligently acts to correct for them. The intellectually vital person is naturally or has learned to be energetic, active, alert, attentive, and inquisitive, contrary to the natural tendency to cognitive laziness. We suggest that these intellectual virtues, like the moral virtues, will cluster in the personality, and will tend to be mutually reinforcing and mutually recruiting, even as each has its own corrective function. (shrink)

Recent flashpoints in Black-Jewish relations--Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, the violence in Crown Heights, Leonard Jeffries' polemical speeches, the O.J. Simpson verdict, and the contentious responses to these events--suggest just how wide the gap has become in the fragile coalition that was formed during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Instead of critical dialogue and respectful exchange, we have witnessed battles that too often consist of vulgar name-calling and self-righteous finger-pointing. Absent from these exchanges are two vitally important (...) and potentially healing elements: Comprehension of the actual history between Blacks and Jews, and level-headed discussion of the many issues that currently divide the two groups. In Struggles in the Promised Land, editors Jack Salzman and Cornel West bring together twenty-one illuminating essays that fill precisely this absence. As Salzman makes clear in his introduction, the purpose of this collection is not to offer quick fixes to the present crisis but to provide a clarifying historical framework from which lasting solutions may emerge. Where historical knowledge is lacking, rhetoric comes rushing in, and Salzman asserts that the true history of Black-Jewish relations remains largely untold. To communicate that history, the essays gathered here move from the common demonization of Blacks and Jews in the Middle Ages; to an accurate assessment of Jewish involvement of the slave trade; to the confluence of Black migration from the South and Jewish immigration from Europe into Northern cities between 1880 and 1935; to the meaningful alliance forged during the Civil Rights movement and the conflicts over Black Power and the struggle in the Middle East that effectively ended that alliance. The essays also provide reasoned discussion of such volatile issues as affirmative action, Zionism, Blacks and Jews in the American Left, educational relations between the two groups, and the real and perceived roles Hollywood has play in the current tensions. The book concludes with personal pieces by Patricia Williams, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Michael Walzer, and Cornel West, who argues that the need to promote Black-Jewish alliances is, above all, a "moral endeavor that exemplifies ways in which the most hated group in European history and the most hated group in U.S. history can coalesce in the name of precious democratic ideals." At a time when accusations come more readily than careful consideration, Struggles in the Promised Land offers a much-needed voice of reason and historical understanding. Distinguished by the caliber of its contributors, the inclusiveness of its focus, and the thoughtfulness of its writing, Salzman and West's book lays the groundwork for future discussions and will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary American culture and race relations. (shrink)

This paper focuses on school choice and the extent to which admissions to publicly-funded secondary schools in England address issues of equity and social justice. It argues that schools with responsibility for their own admissions are more likely than others to act in their own self interest by 'selecting in' or 'creaming' particular pupils and 'selecting out' others. Given this, it is argued that individual schools should not be responsible for admissions. Instead, admissions should be the responsibility of a (...) local authority (or non-partisan body); this body should make decisions about who should be allocated to which school on the basis of the expressed wishes of the parents, and the admissions criteria of the school in question. Admissions criteria should be objective, clear and fair and the admissions system itself should address issues of equity and social justice. It is argued that systems where there are some 'controls' on the choice process should be facilitated to address equity and social justice considerations which can benefit individuals and communities. (shrink)

First, on the "lawless adjudicator." The question I want to pose is this: Why is it so hard for the legal academy - and the legal profession - to come to grips with the bare logic of the charge, much less the case, that Vere acted lawlessly, and therefore criminally, and indeed murderously, when he willfully distorted the governing law, so as to execute Billy? Why has this quite specific legal claim not received more of a hearing? Is it because (...) Weisberg was not sufficiently considerate in his communication of this idea? On first blush that seems implausible: It is one thing, after all, to argue syllogistically that Claggart is Christ, that Claggart is a villain, and that therefore Christ is a villain-one can see why that claim may require considerate communication - but the indictment of the fictional Vere in a nineteenth century novella? Why has it proven so hard for the academy to hear Weisberg's claim that Vere is a murderer? Here is the syllogism: Vere was charged with the duty to uphold the law, he betrayed the law and his duty to apply it in order to execute an innocent man, and he did it knowingly, intentionally, and with plenty of malice aforethought, and for the most profoundly personal, political reasons. Therefore, Vere is a lawless adjudicator, a dissembler, a criminal, a murderer. Does that straightforward legal argument - that an adjudicator is a man to whom the power to declare what the law is has been delegated; that an adjudicator might be a criminal, and might achieve criminal ends, through dissembling, misrepresenting, or perverting legal texts, and thereby through breaching a trust - itself require considerate communication? Has our faith in adjudication reached such absurd heights that the lawless or criminal adjudicator has become an unthinkable oxymoron? Or, have our expectations dropped so low that the phrase "lawless adjudicator" has become redundant, so self evident, that the presentation, the claim, that an adjudicator is lawless, is just a trite, banal, and unnecessary restatement of a mode of being always and already present in courts of law? (shrink)

Almost self-fulfilling, commonly held negative stereotypes about old age and memory can impair older adults’ episodic memory performance, due to age-based stereotype threat or self-stereotyping effects. Research studies demonstrating detrimental impacts of age stereotypes on memory performance are generally conducted in research laboratories or medical settings, which often underestimate memory abilities of older adults. To better understand the “real world” impact of negative age and memory stereotypes on episodic memory, the present research tested story recall performance of late (...) middle-aged and older adults following a naturalistic age stereotype manipulation, wherein every day, newspaper-style materials were either embedded with negative age and memory stereotype stimuli or neutral stimuli. Furthermore, all participants were tested in favorable, familiar environments. Potential moderators of the stereotype effects, e.g., metamemory beliefs, were assessed at baseline. Current memory evaluation and subjective age, as well as perceived stereotype threat and task-related anxiety, were assessed following the stereotype manipulation as potential mechanisms of the expected stereotype effects. Results suggested a contrast effect, as the stereotype group demonstrated superior story recall performance compared to the control group. Marginally significant moderation effects by age and perceived stereotype threat indicated that stereotype rejection was present for late middle-aged adults but not older adults, indicative of stereotype lift, and for individuals who reported low and average, but not high, levels of perceived stereotype threat. Additionally, a trend suggested more positive memory evaluation for those in the stereotype group who reported awareness of the stereotype stimuli than those who did not notice the stimuli. These results are consistent with other research demonstrating benefits to memory performance in adulthood based on motivational and contextual factors, such as using relevant memory materials and testing in favorable conditions. Moreover, the results of this study contribute to our understanding of individuals’ responses to different types of stereotype stimuli, and the differential impact of stereotype manipulations that are subtle versus blatant. Individuals were motivated to counteract negative stereotype effects when conditions were supportive, stereotype presentations were naturalistic, and personal beliefs were positive. (shrink)

A new approach to introducing theology As God's self-communication to humans, Jesus is the key to the human search for meaning, argues Thomas West. He therefore introduces the practice of theology through Christology. From the question of personal meaning and self-constitution and their relationship to transcendent meaning and value, he proceeds to discuss the figure and import of Jesus and then the ethical imperative engendered through encounter with him. Fresh and clear, West's book is an invitation (...) to grapple with one's religious commitments, especially in light of recent insights in biblical studies and Continental, feminist, and liberation theologies. This new text will prove an engaging and effective introduction to theological thinking for both undergraduates and Christian adults. (shrink)

A radical concept of power identifies social processes which (whether as ?ideology?, ?false consciousness?, or ?the spectacle') influence people's actions by moulding their beliefs or desires. However, seeing people as deluded is to risk treating them as less than fully autonomous beings. Despite his libertarian intentions, Lukes fails to guard against this paternalistic implication. His view still implies that it is the social critic who is in the best position to identify the real interests of an oppressed group. Here it (...) is argued that power should be conceived as an intrusion on the ?formative practices? of people. It is possible to identify power as an unwanted influence on the processes in which people ?form and discover? interests, while maintaining that interests can only be self?ascribed. This solution requires a concept of formation as both irreducibly social and yet potentially free. Neither Foucault nor Habermas can provide such a solution, despite some valuable insights. In the end, we must look at the influences of power on formative practices which are actual rather than idealized, productive rather than reflective, and which involve the whole person rather than merely the intellect. (shrink)

This book traces the genealogy of ideas of reason, self and sexuality in the West, opening the way to a richer and more diverse understanding of sexual experience. Western philosophy and religion have distorted and continue to distort our experience of sex and love through three far-reaching constellations of reason, self and sexuality. Thinkers like Plato, Aquinas and Kant helped to fashion an ascetic ideal of reason hostile to bodily pleasures and sexual diversity. By contrast, philosophical hedonism (...) advocates a less demanding conception of rationality and defends sexual pleasure. But this approach of thinkers like Hume, Bentham, La Mettrie and de Sade is still one-sided and limiting. A third constellation, Romanticism avoids the limitations of both forms of rationalism, but in the name of a religion of love and passion that ultimately threatens the integrity of the self. In Reason and Sexuality in Western Thought, a richer understanding of sexual experience is traced to a dissident philosophical tradition. In their different ways Montaigne, Spinoza, Hegel and Kierkegaard, Marcuse and Foucault contribute to a more holistic, multi-layered and open conception of reason, sexuality and the self. This book will be essential reading for all students of philosophy and gender studies. (shrink)

WikiSilo is a tool for theorizing across interdisciplinary fields such as Cognitive Science, and provides a vocabulary for talking about the problems of doing so. It can be used to demonstrate that a particular cognitive theory is complete and coherent at multiple levels of discourse, and commensurable with and relevant to a wider domain of cognition. WikiSilo is also a minimalist theory and methodology for effectively doing science. WikiSilo is simultaneously similar to and distinct, as well as integrated and separated (...) from Wikipedia™. This paper will introduce the advantages of WikiSilo for use in the Cognitive Sciences. (shrink)

A heuristic proof is given that the divergent QCD perturbation series is, asymptotic. By treating it as an asymptotic expansion we show that it makes sense to keep only the first few terms. The example of e+e− annihilation is considered. It is shown that by keeping only the first few terms one can get within a per cent (or smaller) of the complete sum of the series even at very low momenta where the coupling is large. More generally, this (...) affords an explanation of the phenomena of precocious scaling and why keeping only leading order corrections generally works so well. (shrink)

WEST S, MAPEDZAHAMA V, AHERN M and RUDGE T. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 177–187 [Epub ahead of print]Rethinking shiftwork: mid‐life nurses making it work!Many current analyses of shiftwork neglect nurses’ own voices when describing the dis/advantages of a shiftworking lifestyle. This paper reports the findings of a critical re‐analysis of two studies conducted with female mid‐life Australian nurses to explore the contention that the ‘problem‐centred’ focus of current shiftwork research does not effectively address the ‘real’ issue for mid‐life nurses, (...) that is, how to develop and maintain shiftwork tolerance. Participants used shiftwork to: (i) manage, navigate and negotiate various aspects of their nursing work and the workplace itself; (ii) facilitate more manageable work/life negotiations; and (iii) self‐identify opportunities to engage in their own self‐care (body work and mind work). The findings thus went beyond simply exposing what nursing bodies do in time and space by bringing to the fore discussions of ‘time‐body’ relationships, the embodiment of time and nurses re/configuration of that time demonstrating that the frequently unacknowledged positive aspects of shiftwork, when centred in discussions, give voice to other ways to think about shiftwork and a shiftworking lifestyle. Thus, our contention is that the ‘problem‐centred’ focus of current shiftwork debates does little to address the ‘real’ issue for shiftworking mid‐life female nurses – the development and maintenance of shiftwork tolerance. (shrink)

It once seemed almost self-evident that the extraordinary progress of Greek astronomy and mathematics in the Hellenistic age were, at least in part, the result of contact with Babylonian and Egyptian culture. But, whatever they may have owed to Babylonia in the exact sciences, there is now a growing consensus that even as early as Eudoxus the Greeks had advanced beyond the point where they might have profited from Egyptian help, and it is not easy to find a solid (...) basis for the widespread Greek belief in the superior wisdom of the Egyptian hierarchy. Yet the preface to the famous Calendar for the Saite nome, P. Hibeh 27, provides circumstantial evidence that one Greek, at least, in the fourth or early third century B.C., found in Egypt an instrument for measuring the time at night which was new to him and which he may well have found impressive in its accuracy. (shrink)

The ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr about public ethics that were generated in his essays and books during the 1930s and early 1940s coexisted in the same Harlem neighborhood with ideas about public ethics generated by black women activists working for social change during this historical period. This essay explores an approach to constructing Christian ethics by placing these perspectives, by Niebuhr and the Harlem women activists, in "conversation." Highlighting their common quest for ideas that help to bring radical social change (...) to alleviate subjugating conditions, I specifically analyze the differing understandings of Marxist communism by Niebuhr and Harlem women Communist Party activists. I suggest that a dialogue such as this can fruitfully inform considerations of self-interest, political struggle, and the role of religion in building public ethics for a pluralistic society. (shrink)

The emerging interdisciplinary field of “Law and Emotions” brings together scholars from law, psychology, classics, economics, literature and philosophy all of whom have a defining interest in law’s various relations to our emotions and to emotional life: they share a passion for law’s passions. They also share the critical premise, or assumption, that most legal scholars of at least the last half century, with a few exceptions, have mistakenly accorded too great of a role to reason, rationality, and the cool (...) calculations of self interest, and have accorded too small a role to emotion, to the creation, the imagining, the generation, the interpretation, and the reception of law. Their scholarship is in part offered as a collective corrective to what they perceive as the legal academy’s dominant and ill-conceived bias toward reason and rationalism, when explaining legal phenomena. In my comments this morning, however, I want to pose a question that I believe has been neglected by law and emotions scholars, and I will urge that we center it. To summarize my criticism: Law and Emotions scholars have looked at emotion’s impact on law and on our understanding of justice, and at law’s impact on emotional life, and have done so to great effect. What they, or we, haven’t much to date investigated, however, are the emotions law produces, or authors, or sires, or births, or fathers – the emotions that law itself generates, rather than the emotions that affect law or the emotions that law affects. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in liberal circles that individual persons have a right to individual autonomy or self-determination. Each mentally competent adult has a right to be at liberty to live and shape their own life in accordance with their own view about what makes for a good life, free from undue coercion or interference by others, so long as they do not harm others. In the words of John Stuart Mill, mentally-competent persons should have the liberty of “framing (...) the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they may think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong”. (shrink)

Since the turn of the century there has been a strong trend to break through the wall which has separated philosophy from the “special sciences” and to investigate the problems which require a good judgment in both philosophy and science. The evolution of science itself and the increasing relevance of science in human life have given immense momentum to this trend. But this momentum could not be appreciated in its actual strength because scientists who wanted to raise their voices had (...) trouble in finding a Journal where they could communicate with the people who were interested, for almost all the scientific journals were devoted exclusively to technical papers. In founding Philosophy of Science Dr. Malisoff started the construction of a channel by which this important flow of scientific investigation could reach its public. This line of thought found in the journal a possibility of self-expression and it became a real force in the life of the community of scientists and scholars, and even of educated men in general. From the first volume, papers were published which have later been quoted in every discussion about the philosophy of science. I mention, as an example only, R. Carnap's paper on Testability and Meaning. Nobody who has wanted information and stimulation in this modern field of investigation could get it without looking into Malisoff's Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature strikes a deathblow to modern European philosophy by telling a story about the emergence, development and decline of its primary props: the correspondence theory of truth, the notion of privileged representations and the idea of a self-reflective transcendental subject. Rorty's fascinating tale—his-story—is regulated by three fundamental shifts which he delineates in detail and promotes in principle: the move toward anti-realism or conventionalism in ontology, the move toward the demythologizing of the Myth (...) of the Given or anti-foundationalism in epistemology, and the move toward detranscendentalizing the subject or dismissing the mind as a sphere of inquiry. (shrink)

Effective communication during a pandemic, such as the current COVID-19 crisis, can save lives. At the present time, social and physical distancing measures are the lead strategy in combating the spread of COVID-19. In this study, a survey was administered to 705 adults from Switzerland about their support and practice of social distancing measures to examine if their responses depended on (1) whether these measures were supported by a government official or an internationally recognized celebrity as a spokesperson, (2) whether (...) this spokesperson was liked, and (3) the respondent’s age. We also considered several attitudinal and demographic variables that may influence the degree to which people support and comply with social distancing measures. We found that the government official was more effective in eliciting responses supportive of social distancing, particularly as manifested in the stated current compliance with social distancing measures. The effect was substantially stronger among older respondents, although these respondents expressed a lower risk perception. Although there was a general trend for greater endorsement of the social distancing measures among participants who liked the spokesperson, this was non-significant. In addition, respondents’ greater support and compliance was positively associated with (1) higher concern for the current situation, (2) higher concern for the well-being of others, and (3) greater belief that others were practicing social distancing, and negatively with (4) greater self-reported mobility. Current compliance correlated negatively with (5) household size. Since different parts of the population appear to have different perceptions of risk and crisis, our preliminary results suggest that different spokespersons may be needed for different segments of the population, and particularly for younger and older populations. The development of evidence-based knowledge is required to further identify who would be the most effective spokesperson, and in particular to groups with low risk perception and low compliance. (shrink)

Why the West is different -- Religiously secular: the making of America -- Trouble with the law: Magna Carta and the limits of the law -- christianity and democracy: friend and foe -- Saving humanism from the humanists -- Christianity and atheism: a family affair -- The accidental midwife: the emergence of a scientific culture -- No doubts as to how one ought to act: Darwin's doubts and his faith -- The religion of Christianity and the religion of human (...) rights -- The secular self -- Always with you: capital, inequality and the absence of war -- The rise of Christian populism -- Not just mere rhetoric: the word in U.S. politics. (shrink)

The rural health context in the United States presents unique ethical challenges to its approximately 60 million residents, who represent about one quarter of the overall population and are distributed over three-quarters of the country’s land mass. The rural context is not only identified by the small population density and distance to an urban setting but also by a combination of social, religious, geographical, and cultural factors. Living in a rural setting fosters a sense of shared values and beliefs, a (...) strong work ethic, self-reliance, and a tendency for close-knit extended social structures where overlapping relationships are commonplace. (shrink)

The Higher Self is a concept introduced by Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, into transpersonal psychology. This notion is explained and linked up with the Western mystical tradition. Here, coming from antiquity and specifically from the neo-Platonic tradition, a similiar concept has been developed which became known as the spark of the soul, or summit of the mind. This history is sketched and the meaning of the term illustrated. During the middle ages it was developed into a psychology (...) of mysticism by Thomas Gallus, popularized by Bonaventure, and radicalized by the Carthusian writer Hugh of Balma. Spark of the soul signifies an "organ of the mystical experience." It is argued that the split introduced into history between outer and inner experience has lain dormant ever since the 13th century, with inner experience relegated to the private and mystical realm. By introducing this concept, transpersonal psychology reconnects with this tradition and has to be aware of the legacy: to achieve the theoretical, and if possible scientific, integration of both types of experience by drawing on the experiential nature of this concept and fostering good research. (shrink)

Through the vehicle of Nicolas Sarkozy’s so-called “Dakar Address” we will analyse the West’s persisting lack of insight into the need for a Western decolonization. We will try to identify the dangers that come from this refusal, such as the abidance in colonial patterns, the enduring self-understanding as superior com-pared to Africa, and the persisting unwillingness to accept the colonial guilt. Decolonization has to be understood as a two-fold business. Decolonization is over-coming endured and perpetrated violence. It is (...) not only important that the colonial oppressed regain strength, it is equally important that the perpetrator of colonial violence understand their excess of violence and work on effecting its return impossible. We explain how Western thinking remains dangerous and untrustwor-thy if it refuses its own decolonization. Finally, we will draw attention to a fundamental pattern of Western thought that clashes with the fundamental values of the West: contempt. In a final step we suggest how this contempt can be overcome through desuperiorisation and the establishment of elative ethics. (shrink)

From the earliest times, American ethics, the rules for the moral \& intellectual life of the West, used to be founded upon the two principles of self-reliance and good neighborliness. Here we consider the underlying functions of neural brain circuits, organic structures that have evolved adaptively by Darwinian rules subject to selection pressure. In the left brain resides our self-reliant private Ego, making plans, launching initiatives. Your public Ego dwells in the right brain, looking around, meeting with (...) your friendly neighbor. A main component is our bilateral interior cosmos, providing us with all the detailed information about our environment as well as the universe at large. (shrink)

Richard McCormick examines the concepts of postmodernity and postmodernism as they apply to West Germany, discussing them against the background of cultural and political upheaval in that country since the 1960s, rather than exclusively in the more familiar setting of intellectual history. Considering six literary and cinematic texts that are marked by a preoccupation with the self and subjectivity, he underscores the crucial influence of feminism on writers and filmmakers--and on the "postmodern." In a broad international context he (...) describes the conflicting forces that affected the West German student movementthe rationalistic tradition of the Weimar Left and more "irrational" influences such as French existentialism and surrealism (as well as the American "Beat" movement and rock & roll)--and shows how these forces played themselves out so that dogmatic Marxist Leninism was repudiated in favor of a "New Subjectivity.". At the center of the discussion are the novels Lenz by Peter Schneider, Class Love (Klassenliebe) by Karin Struck, and Devotion by Botho Strauss, and the films Wrong Move written by Peter Handke and directed by Wim Wenders, Germany, Pale Mother by Helma Sanders-Brahms, and The Subjective Factor by Helke Sander. The author shows how ongoing attempts to attack the separation of emotion from reason, life from art, the private from the public, and the personal from the political brought about changes in outlook, from the 1960s to the early 1980s, that are related to the rise of new political movements--ecology, nuclear disarmament, and feminism. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 170-174 [Access article in PDF] A Buddhist History of the West: Studies In Lack. By David R. Loy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 244 pp. The religious and philosophical situation of our time seems polarized between resurgent fundamentalisms and a cosmopolitan awareness bridging heretofore separated traditions. Even a few decades ago the notion of a dialogue between East and West (...) was a novelty in which demarcated traditions and cultures (say the Buddhist East and the Christian West) experimented with attempts to find a common language to speakacross the boundaries between their respective identities. In such a context,"Western Buddhists" were those pilgrims of the counterculture who "went East" in search of some civilizational and spiritual other; the West, abjected to the realm of soulless scientism or outdated religious authoritarianism, was left behind. The situation is different at the beginning of the twenty-first Christian century. The dialectical complexities, both inwardly in the soul or mind of seekers, and outwardly in the strange twists of contemporary history, emerge to forbid any simple assessments of what can be left behind or indeed what the use can be of what seekers have found in the "non-West." People of Western background begin to realize and consciously address the [End Page 170] karmic-historical presuppositions of their search, which continue to constitute a kind of historical unconscious to the formulation of any possible "Western Buddhisms." Meanwhile, while fundamentalists of many backgrounds posit "clashes of civilizations" that assume an absoluteness of traditional distinctions, cosmopolitans realize that, for all the particularity of their respective starting points, the global situation is inextricably a shared one. In such a context, what canWestern Buddhist intellectuals, cognizant of their own starting points but having learned some things along the Way that are perhaps of universal relevance, speak to our common condition?The "Buddhist History of the West" that David Loy provides is less a historical narrative of the events constitutive of the societies descending from Greco-Roman civilization through European epochs and American empire into the age of globalization than a form of psychoanalytic anamnesis of those societies' cultural constructions of reality. Loy's psychoanalytic interpretive frame is composed of Buddhist insight into the human mind's deep-seated grasping for solidity and certainty in the face of a reality fundamentally characterized by impermanence and ungroundedness (the "Lack" of the subtitle, our simultaneous awareness of death, impermanence, andontological emptiness and the ego's wish for eternal selfhood in an endless but impossibly fulfilling world). Loy's Buddhism is combined with the existential psychology of Ernest Becker and the revisionist Freudianism of Norman O. Brown called on as Western resources for the spiritual therapeutics "the West" seems to need as it enters the third Christian millennium both triumphant and in despair of any meaning to accompany its economic and pop-cultural hegemony.Seven anamnestic chapters take us through twenty-five hundred years of Western cultural constructions, from the Greek and Roman philosophical inquiries into Freedom, a kind of origin-tale of Humanism seen as a "religious" (religion for Loy being the way humans attempt to answer the problem of Lack as if to ground our groundlessness) vision of meaning as the development of human capacities for rational thought, through the intertwining of classical and Christian constructions in medieval and Renaissance periods, through the Protestant Reformation into the political and ideological space of modernity, culminating in a vision of the globalizing West as purveying a "Religion of the Market," an ironically meaningless (centered on the symbolic code for Value—Money—as a displacement of Value itself) system of meaning. This last, our contemporary situation, would perhaps be simply a problem of aesthetic tastelessness (American pop culture performing the dissolution of all surviving traditional sacred orders following the description of capitalism by Marx as causing "all that is sacred" to "melt into air") were it not for the massive social injustice and environmental devastation it structurally produces. Loy's therapeutic vision, following the Buddhist deconstruction of the demarcated "self" and Becker and Brown's cultural-historical or collective... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article aims to bring some understanding to the phenomenon called compassion. The use of particular linguistic expressions to denote the phenomenon of compassion in the East and West can confuse us, as those terms are embedded in unique cultural settings. This article undertakes a historical, etymological, and philosophical exploration of the terms, compassion and karuna. The article will include a short literature review of these concepts and an investigation of the differences and similarities between them. The concluding speculation (...) is that the Western perspective on compassion is founded on an individualistic, self-centred vision, and the karuna of the East is founded on a communitarian, non-self based vision. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article takes issue with the current orthodoxy that the idea of ‘the West' as a supranational self-description based on civilizational commonality first emerged in English in the 1890s and 1900s in the context of the needs of British high imperialism. It shows, first, that there were, already in the eighteenth century, incipient attempts towards a term denoting a distinctive West-European cultural unity. It argues, further, that such uses were rather casual and interchangeable with overwhelmingly more (...) references to ‘Europe' as the supranational civilizational entity that the authors identified with, until - roughly - the middle of the nineteenth century. The first conscious and sustained attempts to articulate a distinctive ‘Western' identity and a concept of ‘the West' that was promoted as an alternative to the allegedly confusing term ‘Europe' came in the 1850s and 1860s, promoted by the British Comtists. Thus, while some of the first, relatively inconsistent, uses of ‘the West' conform to the stereotype of celebrating a liberty-cherishing ‘West', others – the most sustained articulations of an idea of ‘the West' – were inspired by an overtly illiberal project. The article argues that in both cases ‘the West’ was imported into English usage from German and French. (shrink)

The terrorists will win because they have nothing to lose if they try and fail, whereas we here in the West have become so concerned with the amenities of life (such as our gas-guzzling SUVs) that, lest we should have to forgo them, we would rather appease evil itself.

Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented or created the concept of self as an inner space--as space into which one can enter and in which one can find God. This concept of inwardness, says Cary, has worked its way deeply into the intellectual heritage of the West and many Western individuals have experienced themselves as inner selves. After surveying the idea of inwardness in Augustine's predecessors, Cary offers a re-examination of Augustine's own writings, making the controversial point that (...) in his early writings Augustine appears to hold that the human soul is quite literally divine. Cary goes on to contend that the crucial Book 7 of the Confessions is not a historical report of Augustine's "conversion" experience, but rather an explanation of his intellectual development over time. (shrink)

For the West … China as a land in the Far East becomes traditionally the image of the ultimate Other. What Foucault does in his writing is, of course, not so much to endorse this image as to show, in the light of the Other, how knowledge is always conditioned in a certain system, and how difficult it is to get out of the confinement of the historical a priori, the epistemes or the fundamental codes of Western culture. And (...) yet he takes the Borges passage seriously and remarks on its apparent incongruity with what is usually conceived about China in the Western tradition. If we are to find any modification of the traditional image of China in Foucault’s thought, it is then the association of China not with an ordered space but with a space without any conceivable arrangement or coherence, a space that makes any logical ordering utterly unthinkable. Significantly, Foucault does not give so much as a hint to suggest that the hilarious passage from that “Chinese encyclopaedia” may have been made up to represent a Western fantasy of the Other, and that the illogical way of sorting out animals in that passage an be as alien to the Chinese mind as it is to the Western mind.In fact, the monstrous unreason and its alarming subversion of Western thinking, the unfamiliar and alien space of China as the image of the Other threatening to break up ordered surfaces and logical categories, all turn out to be, in the most literal sense, a Western fiction. Nevertheless, that fiction serves a purpose in Foucault’s thought, namely, the necessity of setting up a framework for his archaeology of knowledge, enabling him to differentiate the self from what is alien and pertaining to the Other and to map out the contours of Western culture recognizable as a self-contained system. Indeed, what can be a better sign of the Other than a fictionalized space of China? What can furnish the West with a better reservoir for its dreams, fantasies, and utopias? Zhang Longxi, author of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theories of Literature , is currently writing a dissertation in comparative literature at Harvard University. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry is “The Tao and the Logos: Notes on Derrida’s Critique of Logocentrism”. (shrink)

The work of the French Lithuanian Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, describes a perceptive rethinking of the possibility of concrete acts of goodness in the world, a rethinking never more necessary than now, in the wake of the cruel realities of the twentieth century—ten million dead in the First World War, forty million dead in the Second World War, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Soviet gulags, the grand slaughter of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” the pointless and gory Vietnam War, the Cambodian self-genocide (...) and many an attempted extermination from the face of the earth of entire nations of indigenous peoples. The list of horrors goes on and on—daily holocausts that do not distinguish between the civilian and the soldier, the guilty and the innocent, those deserving of life and those less deserving. (shrink)

Following the success of the publication of "The Supreme Doctrine" in 1998, Sussex Academic is proud to announce a completely new and updated translation by ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in LackGereon KopfDavid R. Loy. A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack. SUNY Series in Religious Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 244.David Loy's most recent work, A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack, constitutes an intellectual history of Europe from what he calls a "Buddhist perspective." His (...) obvious goals in this book are (1) to develop a heuristic device, if not a mature methodology, out of the Buddhist intellectual tradition and to apply it to matters that are not necessarily related to the Buddhist tradition, and (2) to reread European history from a new standpoint. I have to confess that I am not a historian and thus cannot evaluate Loy's historical claims; however, from my perspective as a scholar of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, it seems to me that not only does Loy succeed on both counts but his study of European history from what he calls the perspective of lack reveals astonishing yet previously barely highlighted insights into European thought. It also undermines, in a methodological slight of hand that at times evokes Michel Foucault's approach, the conventional assumptions about the dominant paradigms of the generally accepted periods of European history. I do not want to claim that Loy's methodology resembles Foucault's "archaeology" in any way; however, it does demonstrate that discourses and time periods are fluid rather than static and that their paradigm depends on, and changes in accordance with, the perspective of the historian.For example, seen from Loy's perspective of lack, the central and most formative event of European history was neither the Renaissance nor the Enlightenment, but the Papal Revolution of the late eleventh century. In general, Loy's book is filled with observations and indictments of common myths that are not only provocative in nature but sure to challenge many of the presuppositions that the proponents of the so-called Western World hold dear. In concrete terms, Loy seems to focus on and examine not so much European intellectual history but the myths that are used to argue for the superiority of the "West": freedom, progress, romantic love, the sanctity of the nation-state, and free-market capitalism.Loy chooses as his standpoint "a Buddhist perspective," namely the "perspective of lack." He takes as his basic assumption the dictum he borrows from early Buddhism and, as he adds, psychotherapy, namely that humans have to live with the basic frustration-Loy's translation of dukkha, which is usually rendered as "suffering"-that reality does not conform to our innermost desires. We desire immortality but cannot avoid the impermanence of all living beings. The awareness of our impermanence not only shatters our sense of and quest for a self, but it also [End Page 580] arouses the "immediate and terrifying (because quite valid) suspicion... that "'I' am not real right now" (p. 3).This frightening sense of lack propels humans onto what Norman Brown calls the Oedipal project, that is, the attempt to create oneself. This sense of lack, Loy remarks, is common to all religions, but what separates Buddhism from most other religious traditions is that it does not offer a self and some kind of immortality, on the one hand, and refrains from reifying this sense of lack as, for example, "sin," on the other. Rather, Buddhism, to Loy, can be "understood as a way to resolve our sense of lack" (p. 6). With regard to his present project, Loy asks, "[i]f that (the sense-of-the-self's sense of lack) gives us insight into the individual human condition, can it also shed light on the collective dynamics of society and nations?" (p. 8). In other words, Loy asks how the interpretation of European history would change if one were to choose the primary Buddhist assumption, namely the deep anxiety over one's future death and present-day insignificance and groundlessness, as one's starting point.However, Loy is quick to argue that this standpoint is not unique to Buddhism, and he corroborates his perspective on lack with the findings of psychotherapy, mostly the... (shrink)

Under the post-metaphysical sky “old” humanistic-oriented education is possible solely at the cost of its transformation into its negative, into a power that is determined to diminish human potentials for self-exaltation. Nothing less than total metamorphosis is needed to rescue the core of humanistic genesis: the quest for edifying Life and resistance to the call for “home-returning” into the total harmony that is promised to us within nothingness.

This collection of essays examines urban communities and societies in Asia and the West to shed much-needed light on issues that have emerged as the world experiences its new urban turn. An urbanized world should be an improving place, one that is better to live in, one where humans can flourish. This book examines contemporary practices of care of the self in cities in Asia and the West, including challenges to citizenship and even the right to the (...) city itself. Written by a range of academics from different backgrounds (from architecture and urbanism, anthropology, social science, psychology, gender studies, history, and philosophy) their trans- and multidisciplinary approaches shed valuable light on what are sometimes quite old problems, leading to fresh perspectives and news ways of dealing with them. One thing that unites all of these papers is their people-centred approach, because, after all, a city is its people. (shrink)