Reverence is an ancient virtue that survives among us in half-forgotten patterns of civility and moments of inarticulate awe. Reverence gives meaning to much that we do, yet the word has almost passed out of our vocabulary.Reverence, says philosopher and classicist Paul Woodruff, begins in an understanding of human limitations. From this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control -- God, truth, justice, nature, even death. It is a quality of character that (...) is especially important in leadership and in teaching, although it figures in virtually every human relationship. It transcends religious boundaries and can be found outside religion altogether.Woodruff draws on thinking about this lost virtue in ancient Greek and Chinese traditions and applies lessons from these highly reverent cultures to today's world. The book covers reverence in a variety of contexts -- the arts, leadership, teaching, warfare, and the home -- and shows how essential a quality it is to a well-functioning society.First published by Oxford University Press in 2001, this new edition of Reverence is revised and expanded. It contains a foreword by Betty Sue Flowers, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, a new preface, two new chapters -- one on the sacred and one on compassion -- and an epilogue focused on renewing reverence in our own lives. (shrink)

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.

This volume offers a fresh exploration of the parts-whole relations within a power and among powers. While the metaphysics of powers has been extensively examined in the literature, powers have yet to be studied from the perspective of their mereology. Powers are often assumed to be atomic; and yet what they can do--and what can happen to them--is complex. But if powers are simple, how can they have complex manifestations? Can powers have parts? According to which rules of composition do (...) powers compose into powers? Given the centrality of powers in current scientific as well as philosophical thought, recognizing and understanding the ontological differences between atomic and mereologically complex powers is important, for both philosophy and science. The first section of this book explores how powers divide; the second section how powers compose. The final section showcases some specific study cases in the domains of quantum mechanics and psychology. Powers, Parts and Wholes will be of interest to professional philosophers and graduate students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science and logic. (shrink)

This explores the role of intention in interpreting designed artefacts. The relationship between how designers intend products to be interpreted and how they are subsequently interpreted has often been represented as a process of communication. However, such representations are attacked for allegedly implying that designers' intended meanings are somehow ‘contained’ in products and that those meanings are passively received by consumers. Instead, critics argue that consumers actively construct their own meanings as they engage with products, and therefore that designers' intentions (...) are not relevant to this process. In contrast, this article asserts the validity and utility of relating intention to interpretation by exploring the nature of that relationship in design practice and consumer response. Communicative perspectives on design are thereby defended and new avenues of empirical enquiry are proposed. (shrink)

The Case for Humanism is the premier textbook to introduce and help students think critically about the 'big ideas' of Western humanism—secularism, rationalism, materialism, science, democracy, individualism, and others—all powerful themes that run through Western thought from the ancient Greeks and the Enlightenment to the present day.

I begin with the assumption that a philosophically significant tension exists today in feminist philosophy of religion between those subjects who seek to become divine and those who seek their identity in mutual recognition. My critical engagement with the ambiguous assertions of Luce Irigaray seeks to demonstrate, one the one hand, that a woman needs to recognize her own identity but, on the other hand, that each subject whether male or female must struggle in relation to the other in order (...) to maintain realism about life and death. No one can avoid the recognition that we are each given life but each of us also dies. In addition, I raise a more general, philosophical problem for analytic philosophers who attempt to read Continental philosophy of religion: how should philosophers interpret deliberately ambiguous assertions? For example, what does Irigaray mean in asserting. 'Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign'? To find an answer, I turn to the distinctively French readings of the Hegelian struggle for recognition which have preoccupied Continental philosophers especially since the first half of the last century. I explore the struggle for mutual recognition between womrn and men who must face the reality of life and death in order to avoid the projection of their fear of mortality onto the other sex. This includes a critical look at Irigaray's account of subjectivity and divinity. I turn to the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff in order to shift the focus from divinity to intersubjectivity. I conclude that taking seriously the struggle for mutual recognition between subjects forces contemporary philosophers of religion to be realist in their living and dying. With this in mind, the lesson from the Continent for philosophy of religion is that we must not stop yearning for recognition. Indeed, we must event risk our autonomy/divinity in seeking to recognize intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Landmarks of Scientfic Socialism: Anti-Dühring (German: Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, "Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science") is a book by Friedrich Engels, which was first published in German in 1878. It had previously been serialised in a periodical called Vorwärts. There were two other German editions during Engels' life. Anti-Dühring was first published in English translation in 1907.The work was perhaps Engels' most important contribution and development within Marxist theory.Eugen Dühring had previously created his own version of socialism, (...) which was supposed to be a replacement for Marxism. This work was supposed to be a defence of Marxism against produced his own version of socialism, intended as a replacement for Marxism from Dühring's attack. (shrink)

Justice and Power in the Sociolegal Studies asks what interdisciplinary work in the law and society tradition tells us about the relationship of law and justice, as well as the way power operates in and through law. The fundamental concepts of justice and power provide points of departure for leading scholars to explore the various domains of socio-legal research. As they note the explicitness of the engagement with issues of power and the relative silence about -- or indirectness in taking (...) on -- questions of justice found in most law and society research, they ask how engagement with issues of power and silence about justice constituted law and society as a research field caught between a desire to have political impact and, at the same time, to maintain its scientific respectability. (shrink)

In this contribution to Text Matters, I would like to introduce gender into my feminist response to Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of the capable subject. The aim is to make, phenomenologically speaking, “visible” the gendering of this subject in a hermeneutic problematic: that of a subject’s loss of confidence in her own ability to understand herself. Ricoeurian hermeneutics enables us to elucidate the generally hidden dimensions in a phenomenology of lost self-confidence; Ricoeur describes capability as “originally given” to each lived (...) body; but then, something has happened, gone wrong or been concealed in one’s loss of confidence. Ricoeur himself does not ask how the gender or sex of one’s own body affects this loss. So I draw on contemporary feminist debates about the phenomenology of the body, as well as Julia Kristeva’s hermeneutics of the Antigone figure, in order to demonstrate how women might reconfigure the epistemic limits of human capability, revealing themselves as “a horizon” of the political order, for better or worse. (shrink)

This paper presents a feminist intervention into debates concerning the relation between human subjects and a divine ideal. I turn to what Irigarayan feminists challenge as a masculine conception of ‘the God’s eye view’ of reality. This ideal functions not only in philosophy of religion, but in ethics, politics, epistemology and philosophy of science: it is given various names from ‘the competent judge’ to the ‘the ideal observer’ (IO) whose view is either from nowhere or everywhere. The question is whether, (...) as Taliaferro contends, my own philosophical argument inevitably appeals to the impartiality and omni-attributes of the IO. This paper was delivered during the APA Pacific 2007 Mini-Conference on Models of God. (shrink)

This chapter presents feminist perspectives on core topics in natural theology. It suggests that a philosophical openness to thinking about nature, about our human relationships, capacities, concepts, and conceptual scheme would enable a constructive feminist perspective on natural theology. Topics discussed include the feminist challenge to the western tradition of natural theology; myth, absolute truth, and male supremacy; sexual difference, transcendence, and religious epistemology. The views of feminist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Michèle Le Doeuff, Mary Daly, Luce Irigaray, (...) and Patrice Haynes are analyzed. (shrink)

Cet essai incite les philosophes contemporains de la religion à repenser le rôle que la philosophie critique de Kant a joué à la fois dans l’inauguration de la nature analytique de la philosophie moderne et dans le développement de la poussée de la critique de la raison vers l’inconditionné. En particulier, il s’agit, dans cet essai, de démontrer que Kant et d’autres rationalistes modernes, comme Spinoza, peuvent contribuer à notre lutte rationnelle dans la vérité et pour elle. Cette démonstration vise (...) un groupe récent de philosophes analytiques de la religion qui ont nommé leur propre travail « théologie analytique » et ont suscité de nouvelles discussions, y compris de nouveaux arguments sur Kant jetant un pont entre la philosophie et la théologie. La culture de l’ouverture réflexive et critique est ici encouragée pour contrôler les prétentions excessives concernant Dieu. (shrink)

ate program and identified the ethical commitments and threats living kidney donors perceive throughout the donation process. Method: This quality improvement project reflects a mixed-methods methodology. Qualitative as well as quantitative data were generated through the donor-advocate consultation sessions and the written Living Donor Satisfaction Survey. Thirteen living donors participated. Results: No threats to donor rights were identified by either the donor or the advocate. Nonrelated donors were motivated by altruism, whereas related donors were motivated by a sense of family. (...) A majority of donors reported being changed emotionally and spiritually by the act of serving as a living donor. The living kidney donors were overwhelmingly extremely satisfied with their decision to donate and perceived the living donor advocacy program as being very good. Discussion: Questions have been raised about what role the donor’s spouse should have during the informed consent process. Further research is needed to better understand the role and power of an advocate when threats to the donor’s rights are noted.... (shrink)