The Phenomenology of Spirit is both one of Hegel's most widely read books and one of his most obscure. The book is the most detailed commentary on Hegel's work available. It develops an independent philosophical account of the general theory of knowledge, culture, and history presented in the Phenomenology. In a clear and straightforward style, Terry Pinkard reconstructs Hegel's theoretical philosophy and shows its connection to ethical and political theory. He sets the work in a historical context and shows (...) the contemporary relevance of Hegel's thought for European and Anglo-American philosophers. The principal audience for the book is teachers and students of philosophy, but the great interest in Hegel's work and the clarity of Pinkard's exposition ensure that historians of ideas, political scientists, and literary theorists will also read it. (shrink)

This study is divided into three parts: the classical tradition; Althusser and after; and modern debates. It includes chapters on class consciousness, ideology and utopia, and the epistemology of sociology, looking at the work of Georg Lukas, Karl Mannheim and Lucien Goldman respectively.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 343-346 [Access article in PDF] The Paradox Topos Lisa Gorton As William Egginton points out, 1 when Dante and Beatrice step outside the cosmos, they step into another set of concentric spheres. 2 These surround our (supposedly) geocentric cosmos, and yet they center upon God. The image affronts our logic of space. If these concentric spheres encompass us, how can (...) they center upon something somewhere else? The notion seems to turn space inside-out. But Dante's spatial paradox is not in truth a paradox of space. Instead, it is a spiritual paradox, set in terms of space. When Dante and Beatrice step outside the cosmos, they step outside space into an old philosophical topos, a spatial image of God. For that reason, Dante's image is not really akin to the spatial paradoxes of modern astrophysics, although Egginton's comparison of the two does provoke some fascinating comments upon medieval concepts of space. Egginton assesses Dante's paradox in light of medieval debates about space, place, and God. However, he overlooks the most important source for Dante's paradox--the symbolic geometry of Neoplatonic philosophy. 3Neoplatonic philosophers use spatial forms to imagine spiritual relationships. They develop a symbolic geometry, a spatial language of thought, which borrows nothing from physical space but its shapes: the center, the circle, and concentric spheres. Neoplatonists use this symbolic geometry because it offers a spatial way to imagine the relationship between a cause and its effect, without importing time differences into that relationship. In this way they seek to avoid the problems of time and causality, which the creation-myth in Timaeus introduced into Plato's philosophy: how and when could a timeless being make time? 4 [End Page 343]Plotinus, the first Neoplatonist, uses symbolic geometry to design an "Intellectual Cosmos," which he treats as quite distinct from our physical cosmos. 5 He imagines the source of life as a center: The Highest cannot be divided and allotted... thus a centre is an independent unity; everything within the circle has its own term in the centre, and to the centre the radii each bring their own. (Enneads, V. 1. 11). The "Highest" exists as the center of this "Intellectual Cosmos." Plotinus treats a center's geometric qualities as metaphysical attributes. Like an undimensioned central point, the "Highest" does not exist in space or time, and yet space and time radiate from it as a circumference radiates from its center.The bare symbolic space of Plotinus's "Intellectual Cosmos" has emotional connotations. Plotinus holds that "the center of a circle is distinctively a point of rest" (Enneads II. 2. 1). Lesser beings must turn sequentially through all the angles their center holds altogether at once: There is, we may put it, something that is centre; about it, a circle of light shed from it; round centre and first circle alike, another circle, light from light; outside that again, not another circle of light but one which, lacking light of its own, must borrow. (Enneads, IV. 3. 17) In Plotinus's "Intellectual Cosmos" life emanates from the center in concentric spheres. 6Dante and Beatrice step into such an "Intellectual Cosmos" when they step outside the physical world. They step into a spatial image that stands outside time and space, at the spiritual center of the poem, when they step into spheres that center upon a light too bright to look upon. Dante wonders where that center could be, and Beatrice responds to his silent question: "The nature of the universe, which holds the center still and moves all else around it, begins here as if from its turning point" (XXVII, 106-9). Egginton comments, "Dante's description of this absolute center as the origin of all movement and force in the universe" is "an 'eerie' likeness of what he [the modern astrophysicist, Robert Osserman] terms the retro-verse." More relevantly, it also refers to the "Intellectual Cosmos" of Neoplatonic philosophy, where the "Highest" is a center of rest, the starting point of light, movement, and life. [End Page 344]Plotinus... (shrink)

Introduction: The decision of “do not attempt resuscitation” in the event of cardiopulmonary arrest is usually made when the patients are critically ill and cannot make an informed choice. Although, various professional bodies have published guidelines, little is know about the patients’ own views regarding DNAR discussion.Aim: The aim of this study was to determine patients’ attitudes regarding discussing DNAR before they are critically ill.Methods: A prospective study was performed in a general out patients department. A questionnaire was distributed to (...) consecutive outpatients along with an explanatory leaflet in the adult outpatient clinic.Results: 364 patients completed the questionnaire . 90% of respondents wanted all patients to be asked regarding DNAR decision at some point during a hospital admission. The majority would not find a DNAR discussion distressing. Only 10% would find it upsetting, however, 48% of these still wanted a discussion. 37% of respondents wanted to discuss DNAR decisions on admission; 32% in outpatients; 17% at consent for surgery, 14% when they are critically ill. 87% of respondents would not object to their relatives being involved in making decisions about their resuscitation status. However, only 12% of the subjects in the study had been involved in discussing the resuscitation status of a relative and 21% would not be comfortable to discuss a relative’s resuscitation status. Although 33% of patients preferred their resuscitation status to simply be documented within their clinical notes, 77% wanted it to be more easily accessible.Conclusions: This study suggests that contrary to current practice most patients want to discuss their DNAR status prior to becoming critically ill. This includes half of the small number that find it distressing to discuss. Although most patients are comfortable with relatives being involved in discussing DNAR, a significant proportion do not want their relatives to be asked. Furthermore, once a decision has been made, the majority of patients want it to be more accessible than current practice allows. (shrink)

He sets out not just to expose the illusions of postmodernism but to show the students he has in mind that they never believed what they thought they believed ...

The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited, stimulating, and quirky enquiry, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer. Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is (...) only in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind. "If you were to ask what provides some meaning in life nowadays for a great many people, especially men, you could do worse than reply 'football.' Not many of them perhaps would be willing to admit as much; but sport stands in for all those noble causes--religious faith, national sovereignty, personal honor, ethnic identity--for which, over the centuries, people have been prepared to go to their deaths. It is sport, not religion, which is now the opium of the people.". (shrink)

In the second half of the eighteenth century, German philosophy came for a while to dominate European philosophy. It changed the way in which not only Europeans, but people all over the world, conceived of themselves and thought about nature, religion, human history, politics, and the structure of the human mind. In this rich and wide-ranging book, Terry Pinkard interweaves the story of 'Germany' - changing during this period from a loose collection of principalities into a newly-emerged nation with (...) a distinctive culture - with an examination of the currents and complexities of its developing philosophical thought. He examines the dominant influence of Kant, with his revolutionary emphasis on 'self-determination', and traces this influence through the development of romanticism and idealism to the critiques of post-Kantian thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. His book will interest a range of readers in the history of philosophy, cultural history and the history of ideas. (shrink)

There are two main ways in which an interest in the sociology of literature can be justified. The first form of justification is realist: literature is in fact deeply conditioned by its social context, and any critical account of it which omits this fact is therefore automatically deficient. The second way is pragmatist: literature is in fact shaped by all kinds of factors and readable in all sorts of contexts, but highlighting its social determinants is useful and desirable from a (...) particular political standpoint.Both of these cases would seem to have something going for them. Hardly anybody would want to deny that literature is in an important sense a social product; but this claim is so general that a specifically “sociological” treatment of literary works does not necessarily follow from it. Metaphors and line endings, after all, are also in some sense social products, so that to attend to these elements of a literary text is not necessarily to deny the work’s sociality. “Social product” would seem too comfortably broad a category, just as “economic product” would seem too crippingly narrow. A problem with the realist case about the sociology of literature, then, is that it is not very clear what exactly is being claimed. The pragmatist case would seem a persuasive rationale for, say, a feminist reading of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, since few people would want to claim that the poem was in some central way about patriarchal relations in the sense that The Rape of the Lock is. A Marxist critic who attended to questions of social class in Treasure Island, perhaps placing Long John Silver in the context of the British shop stewards’ movement and celebrating his antagonism to the gentry, would not necessarily be committed to holding that these issues were “in fact” crucial to the text; he or she would insist instead that they should be brought to light because they were crucial to history and society in general. Terry Eagleton’s recent works include collected essays—Against the Grain and William Shakespeare—as well as a novel, Saints and Scholars. His work in progress is on the ideology of the aesthetic. (shrink)

In Chapters 4 and 5 of his 1998 book From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Frank Jackson propounds and defends a form of moral realism that he calls both ‘moral functionalism’ and ‘analytical descriptivism’. Here we argue that this metaethical position, which we will henceforth call ‘analytical moral functionalism’, is untenable. We do so by applying a generic thought-experimental deconstructive recipe that we have used before against other views that posit moral properties and identify them with certain (...) natural properties, a recipe that we believe is applicable to virtually any metaphysically naturalist version of moral realism. The recipe deploys a scenario we call Moral Twin Earth. (shrink)

One of the founders of modern philosophical thought Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has gained the reputation of being one of the most abstruse and impenetrable of thinkers. This major biography of Hegel offers not only a complete account of the life, but also a perspicuous overview of the key philosophical concepts in Hegel's work in a style that will be accessible to professionals and non-professionals alike. Terry Pinkard situates Hegel firmly in the historical context of his times. The story (...) of that life is of an ambitious, powerful thinker living in a period of great tumult dominated by the figure of Napoleon. The Hegel who emerges from this account is a complex, fascinating figure of European modernity, who offers us a still compelling examination of that new world born out of the political, industrial, social, and scientific revolutions of his period. (shrink)

The first systematic treatment of Karl Popper’s contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences.

It has often been thought that our knowledge of ourselves is _different_ from, perhaps in some sense _better_ than, our knowledge of things other than ourselves. Indeed, there is a thriving research area in epistemology dedicated to seeking an account of self-knowledge that would articulate and explain its difference from, and superiority over, other knowledge. Such an account would thus illuminate the descriptive and normative difference between self-knowledge and other knowledge.¹ At the same time, self- knowledge has also encountered its (...) share of skeptics – philosophers who refuse to accord it any descriptive, let alone normative, distinction. In this paper, we argue that there is at least one _species_ of self-knowledge that is different from, and better than, other knowledge. It is a specific kind of knowledge of one’s concurrent phenomenal experiences. Call knowledge of one’s own phenomenal experiences _phenomenal knowledge_. Our claim is that some (though not all) phenomenal knowledge is different from, and better than, non-phenomenal knowledge. In other. (shrink)

Introduction -- The beginnings of human judgment -- The chemistry, economics, and psychology of praise -- Blame: the necessity and devastation of guilt and shame -- Family judgments, family systems -- Just friends: praise and blame between peers -- Intimate judgments: praise and blame within couples -- Professional dues: praise and blame in the workplace -- Social media and the new challenges to our judgment meter -- Lifelong judgments.

This is a fascinating study of the a-temporal nature of evil in the West. The international authors who have contributed to this text not only concentrate on political, social and legally sanctioned cruelty from the past and present, but also explore the nature of moral transgression in contemporary art, media and literature. Although many forms and practices of what might be called evil' are analysed, all are bound by violence and/or the sexually perverse.

The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited Very Short Introduction, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer. Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is only (...) in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind. (shrink)

Little is known about how and why corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged in lesser developed countries. In order to address this knowledge gap, we used Chile as a test case and conducted a series of in-depth interviews with leaders of CSR initiatives. We also did an Internet and literature search to help provide support for the findings that emerged from our data. We discovered that while there are similarities in the drivers of CSR in developed countries, there are distinct differences (...) as well. In particular, we found that different sectors drive CSR in Chile. In contrast to other geographies where consumer demand and government regulation provided the impetus for CSR efforts, multinational companies (MNCs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are key actors in Chile. MNCs imported their CSR beliefs, skills, and processes into Chile. Their efforts resulted in a virtuous cycle. Once large domestic firms felt pressured by their MNC rivals, they too adopted CSR initiatives. The ability to manage relationships with multiple stakeholders and perceptions of authenticity were also critical to the success of CSR in Chile. Using network theory as a lens, we suggest that network density and centrality largely determine whether CSR efforts will be authentic. Based on these contentions, we suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)

What is real? Less than you might think. We advocate austere metaphysical realism---a form of metaphysical realism claiming that a correct ontological theory will repudiate numerous putative entities and properties that are posited in everyday thought and discourse, and also will even repudiate numerous putative objects and properties that are posited by well confirmed scientific theories. We have lately defended a specific version of austere metaphysical realism which asserts that there is really only one concrete particular, viz., the entire cosmos (...) (see Horgan and Potr (2000, 2002), Potr (2003)). But there are various potential versions of the generic position we are here calling austere metaphysical realism; and it is the generic view that constitutes the ontological part of the overall approach to realism and truth that we will describe here. What is true? More than you might think, given our austere metaphysical realism. We maintain that truth is semantically correct affirmability, under contextually operative semantic standards. We also maintain that most of the time, the contextually operative semantic standards work in such a way that semantic correctness (i.e., truth) is a matter of indirect correspondence rather than direct correspondence between thought or language on the one hand, and the world on the other.1 When correspondence is indirect rather than direct, a given statement (or thought) can be true even if the correct ontology does not include items answering to all the referential commitments (as we will here call them) of the statement. 2 This means that even if a putative object is repudiated by a correct ontological theory, ordinary statements that are putatively about that object may still be true. For instance, the statement “The University of St. Andrews is in Scotland” can be semantically correct (i.e., true) even if the right ontology does not include any entity answering to the referring term ‘The University of St. Andrews’, or any entity... (shrink)

This paper focuses on three under-researched subjects in the corporate social responsibility literature: small businesses, small towns, and consequences of social responsibility for the business owner personally. Small businesses are the vast majority of businesses and make a significant contribution to national economic vitality. Their value to the survival of small towns, where they are often the only businesses, is even more important. Research indicates that the social performance of big and small businesses alike is dependent upon the values and (...) disposition of the top decision maker. Therefore, insight into the owner's motivations for contributing to community betterment and the consequences of that behavior for the business and the owner will add to this literature. Equally important, this knowledge can inform policies aimed at increasing good citizenship for all sizes of businesses regardless of location. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the observation that neoliberalism is a concept that is ‘oft-invoked but ill-defined’. It provides a taxonomy of uses of the term neoliberalism to include: an all-purpose denunciatory category; ‘the way things are’; an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; a dominant ideology of global capitalism; a form of governmentality and hegemony; and a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as both theory and policy discourse. It (...) is argued that this sprawling set of definitions are not mutually compatible, and that uses of the term need to be dramatically narrowed from its current association with anything and everything that a particular author may find objectionable. In particular, it is argued that the uses of the term by Michel Foucault in his 1978–9 lectures, found in The Birth of Biopolitics, are not particularly compatible with its more recent status as a variant of dominant ideology or hegemony theories. It instead proposes understanding neoliberalism in terms of historical institutionalism, with Foucault’s account of historical change complementing Max Weber’s work identifying the distinctive economic sociology of national capitalisms. (shrink)

Understanding Computers and Cognition presents an important and controversial new approach to understanding what computers do and how their functioning is related to human language, thought, and action. While it is a book about computers, Understanding Computers and Cognition goes beyond the specific issues of what computers can or can't do. It is a broad-ranging discussion exploring the background of understanding in which the discourse about computers and technology takes place. Understanding Computers and Cognition is written for a wide audience, (...) not just those professionals involved in computer design or artificial intelligence. It represents an important contribution to the ongoing discussion about what it means to be a machine, and what it means to be human. Book jacket. (shrink)

Creativity is one of the least understood aspects of intelligence and is often seen as intuitive' and not susceptible to rational enquiry. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the area, principally in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, but also in psychology, philosophy, computer science, logic, mathematics, sociology, and architecture and design. This volume brings this work together and provides an overview of this rapidly developing field. It addresses a range of issues. Can computers be creative? Can (...) they help us to understand human creativity? How can artificial intelligence (AI) enhance human creativity? How, in particular, can it contribute to the sciences of the artificial', such as design? Does the new wave of AI (connectionism, geneticism and artificial life) offer more promise in these areas than classical, symbol-handling AI? What would the implications be for AI and cognitive science if computers could not be creative? These issues are explored in five interrelated parts, each of which is introducted and explained by a leading figure in the field. - Prologue (Margaret Boden) - Part I: Foundational Issues (Terry Dartnall) - Part II: Creativity and Cognition (Graeme S. Halford and Robert Levinson) - Part III: Creativity and Connectionism (Chris Thornton) - Part IV: Creativity and Design (John Gero) - Part V: Human Creativity Enhancement (Ernest Edmonds) - Epilogue (Douglas Hofstadter) For researchers in AI, cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, logic, sociology, and architecture and design; and anyone interested in the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence and creativity. (shrink)

Few scholars have investigated the considerations of over-empowered teams from a non-consequential ethics approach. Leveraging a virtue-based ethics lens of team empowerment, we provide a framework of team ethical orientation and over-empowerment using highly influential market research teams as a basis for our analysis. The purpose of this research is to contrast how teams founded on virtue-based ethics can attenuate ethical dilemmas and negative organizational outcomes from team over-empowerment. We provide a framework of four conditions that include Sophisticated, Suppressed, Contagion, (...) and Impeded to discuss alignment between team ethical orientation and team empowerment. Through this framework, we aim to further our understanding of empowered team behavior between action that is virtuous, moral, and ethical and activity that threatens organizational values and goals. (shrink)

Traditional theological ideas, language and imagery tend to take their cue and inspiration from the Beyond: from heaven; the transcendent realm and all that is ‘above us’ that we might inspire to attain. But, given that all life arises from and is dependent upon the soil/earth, what possibilities might exist for new ‘ensoiled’ forms of thinking and practice? We are all earthlings and groundlings and our human qualities and spiritual sensitivities and aspirations must, in an evolutionary sense, arise from our (...) connectivity to the soil and earth. What then can the soil and the life it contains teach us about living harmoniously as part of a community of planetary flourishing? This article will explore how a theology influenced by the soil – an ‘edapho-theology’ – might offer fresh perspectives for re-engaging with the need to create a sustainable future for all life on the planet. (shrink)

Terry F. Godlove discovers in Immanuel Kant's theoretical philosophy resources that have much wider implications beyond Christianity and the philosophical issues that concern monotheism and its beliefs. For Godlove, Kant's insights, when properly applied, can help rejuvenate our understanding of the general study of religion and its challenges. He therefore bypasses what is usually considered to be the "Kantian philosophy of religion" and instead focuses on more fundamental issues, such as Kant's account of concepts, experience, and reason and their (...) significance in controversial matters. _Kant and the Meaning of Religion_ is a subtle and penetrating effort by a leading contemporary philosopher of religion to redefine and reshape the contours of his discipline through a sustained reflection on Kant's so-called "humanizing project.". (shrink)

Why do leaders fail ethically? In this book, Terry L. Price applies a multi-disciplinary approach to an understanding of immorality in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. He argues that leaders can know that a certain kind of behavior is generally required by morality but nonetheless be mistaken as to whether the relevant moral requirement applies to them in a particular situation and whether others are protected by this requirement. Price articulates how leaders make exceptions of themselves, explains how (...) the justificatory force of leadership gives rise to such exception-making, and develops normative prescriptions that leaders should adopt as a response to this feature of their moral psychology. (shrink)

The philosophy of engineering is, in the first instance, concerned to make sense of what we do and how we do it as agents in the world. It is also concerned with understanding the nature of inquiry and exploration in the engineering enterprise. In these latter concerns, the philosophy of engineering constitutes the more general framework for understanding the nature of reality and the role of engineering in it. The philosophy of engineering and the engineering worldview supersede and subsume the (...) philosophy of science and the scientific worldview. (shrink)

This paper focuses on three under‐researched subjects in the corporate social responsibility literature: small businesses, small towns, and consequences of social responsibility for the business owner personally. Small businesses are the vast majority of businesses and make a significant contribution to national economic vitality. Their value to the survival of small towns, where they are often the only businesses, is even more important. Research indicates that the social performance of big and small businesses alike is dependent upon the values and (...) disposition of the top decision maker. Therefore, insight into the owner's motivations for contributing to community betterment and the consequences of that behavior for the business and the owner will add to this literature. Equally important, this knowledge can inform policies aimed at increasing good citizenship for all sizes of businesses regardless of location. (shrink)