Despite some recognition that Aboriginal women who have experienced breast cancer may have unique health needs, little research has documented the experiences of Aboriginal women from their perspective. Our main objective was to explore and to begin to make visible Aboriginal women's experiences with breast cancer using the qualitative research technique, photovoice. The research was based in Saskatchewan, Canada and participants were Aboriginal women who had completed breast cancer treatment. Although Aboriginal women cannot be viewed as a homogeneous group, participants (...) indicated two areas of priority for health‐care: (i) Aboriginal identity and traditional beliefs, although expressed in diverse ways, are an important dimension of breast cancer experiences and have relevance for health‐care; and (ii) there is a need for multidimensional support which addresses larger issues of racism, power and socioeconomic inequality. We draw upon a critical and feminist conception of visuality to interrogate and disrupt the dominant visual terrain (both real and metaphorical) where Aboriginal women are either invisible or visible in disempowering ways. Aboriginal women who have experienced breast cancer must be made visible within health‐care in a way that recognizes their experiences situated within the structural context of marginalization through colonial oppression. (shrink)

Animal use in medical research is widely accepted on the basis that it may help to save human lives and improve their quality of life. Recently, however, objections have been made specifically to the use of animals in scientific investigation of human obesity. This paper discusses two arguments for the view that this form of animal use, unlike some other forms of animal-based medical research, cannot be defended. The first argument leans heavily on the notion that people themselves are responsible (...) for developing obesity and so-called ‘lifestyle’ diseases; the second involves the claim that animal studies of obesity's causes and therapies distract attention from preventive efforts. Drawing on both empirical data and moral reasoning, we argue that the relevant attributions of responsibility and claims about distraction are not plausible, and that, therefore, there is no reason to single out the use of animals in obesity research as especially problematic. (shrink)

This chapter places Alexander in his intellectual context, focusing on his early 1880s work, and exploring how that flows into his mature work. It considers Alexander’s views on two major late nineteenth century debates about the mind. First, what is the relationship of mind to nature? During this period, idealists were battling with realists over whether mind should be identified with nature. I argue Alexander was always a realist, and speculate on his association with Oxford realism. Second, how did our (...) minds evolve biologically? Some theorists argued for naturalism, whilst others argued for supernaturalism. I argue Alexander was always a naturalist. Despite Alexander’s realism and naturalism, he leans towards both idealism and supernaturalism, sharply distinguishing his realism from that of early analytic philosophers. The final part of the chapter explains that while Alexander’s system won few converts, it was widely admired and remains a grand edifice in the history of speculative metaphysics. (shrink)

We attack the SSK's rejection of the distinction between discovery and justification (the DJ distinction), famously introduced by Hans Reichenbach and here defended in a "lean" version. Some critics claim that the DJ distinction cannot be drawn precisely, or that it cannot be drawn prior to the actual analysis of scientific knowledge. Others, instead of trying to blur or to reject the distinction, claim that we need an even more fine-grained distinction (e.g. between discovery, invention, prior assessment, test and (...) justification). Adherents of the SSK, however, maintain that the distinction is useless and perhaps nonexistent. We first argue against the assumption that the SSK's objection to the DJ distinction is just the same as Thomas Kuhn's. Second, we point out general weaknesses of the SSK's arguments against the DJ distinction. Finally, we argue that the distinction is useful not only in order to explicate what is meant by an evaluation but even for the empirical explanation of knowledge. We use two case studies from the history of cognitive science to support this point. (shrink)

In 2003 and 2018 researchers discussed the perils of blind reliance on randomized controlled trials that have been substituted for medical experience and clinical acumen. Although these past articles do well to shed light on this issue, they neglect to discuss the topic of all-cause mortality in controlled trials. The current essay seeks to fill this void and expand the thought put into the appropriateness of all-cause mortality, especially when trials extend excessively far into the future. To do this effectively (...) the current essay leans on trial data from statin research and evidence from cancer screening—where researchers have explicitly called for all-cause mortality to be used in lieu of cancer or cardiovascular specific mortality. The issue with such an endpoint is that it obfuscates the issue at hand, namely that a specific intervention is intended to have a specific effect, not that a specific intervention is supposed to have any kind of effect. The effect(s) of medical interventions ought to be relevant to their intended mechanism of action and not simply any positive effect that can be pulled from trial data. (shrink)

UTONOMY IS VERY HIGHLY PRAISED as something that it is always good to have, and always good to have more of rather than less of.1 The idea seems to be that persons should be autonomous whatever else they might be, and that should act autonomously whatever else it is that they might do. Kantians are fond of saying that a person is autonomous if she or he chooses to live in accordance with the dictates of reason. This, in turn, directly (...) links autonomy to morality, which for Kantians is an ineliminable aspect of reason. I shall discuss this view in Section II. Of course, it is also the case that autonomy is widely heralded as a good by those who do not accept Kant’s philosophical moorings. For instance, to say that women should be more autonomous is not thereby to say that they should be more embracing of this or that moral set of principles. In fact, it is not clear that this assertion pertains to acting morally at all. Autonomy, like liberty, seems to be regarded as a good whatever the philosophical leanings of people might be. In either case, the more the better. (shrink)

In the mid-1260s in Paris, a dispute raged that concerned the relationship between faith and the Augustinian theological tradition on the one side and secular leaning as represented by the arrival in Latin of Aristotle and various Islamic and Jewish interpreters of Aristotle on the other. Masters of the arts faculty in Paris represented the latter tradition, indicated by the phrase "double truth theory." In 1269, Thomas Aquinas wrote the polemical work On There Being Only One Intellect, Against the (...) Averroists (De unitate intellectus contra averroistas). Thomas is intent on countering two views: first, that intellect is not a faculty of the soul that animates our body, and second, that there is a single intellect existing separately that suffices for all people. Brief as it is, this work puts into play all the significant strands of Thomas's teaching on man - historical doctrinal, philosophical, and theological. It is a valuable source for discussing Thomas's views on the relationship between Aristotle and Christianity and puts to rest the misleading claim that Thomas baptized Aristotle." The introduction places the work historically and sketches the controversy to which it was a contribution. Part 2 includes the Latin Leonine text and McInerny's translation. Part 3 analyzes the basic arguments of Thomas's work and provides a series of interpretive essays meant to make Thomas accessible to today's readers. (shrink)

Vesey has collected fifteen essays from Royal Institute of Philosophy lectures on idealism, particularly that of Berkeley, Kant, the Post-Kantians, and, it is claimed, of Wittgenstein. The result is the presentation of idealism as a philosophical viewpoint that is diverse and rooted deeply in Western philosophy. While this volume is not organized into sections, the contributors address such questions as: Did Plato, in Parmenides, lean toward the idealism that holds that the world is essentially structured by categories of thought? (...) How did Descartes make Berkeley’s idealism possible? How do Kant’s “appearances” differ from Berkeley’s “ideas”? Is the traditional “double affection” interpretation of Kant’s idealism—that human experience is the product of unknown things-in-themselves interacting with equally unknown selves—fundamentally mistaken? Is the basic Kantian notion that of the unavoidable relativity of a framework? How did Hegel’s “absolute” idealism differ from Kant’s subjective idealism? How was Fichte a forerunner of Sartre and Wittgenstein? Are the idealist aspects of Marxism compatible with materialism? What is the linguistic philosopher’s equivalent of Bradley’s doctrine of internal relations? Is Bernard Williams right in thinking that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy points in the direction of a transcendental idealism? (shrink)

Vesey has collected fifteen essays from Royal Institute of Philosophy lectures on idealism, particularly that of Berkeley, Kant, the Post-Kantians, and, it is claimed, of Wittgenstein. The result is the presentation of idealism as a philosophical viewpoint that is diverse and rooted deeply in Western philosophy. While this volume is not organized into sections, the contributors address such questions as: Did Plato, in Parmenides, lean toward the idealism that holds that the world is essentially structured by categories of thought? (...) How did Descartes make Berkeley’s idealism possible? How do Kant’s “appearances” differ from Berkeley’s “ideas”? Is the traditional “double affection” interpretation of Kant’s idealism—that human experience is the product of unknown things-in-themselves interacting with equally unknown selves—fundamentally mistaken? Is the basic Kantian notion that of the unavoidable relativity of a framework? How did Hegel’s “absolute” idealism differ from Kant’s subjective idealism? How was Fichte a forerunner of Sartre and Wittgenstein? Are the idealist aspects of Marxism compatible with materialism? What is the linguistic philosopher’s equivalent of Bradley’s doctrine of internal relations? Is Bernard Williams right in thinking that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy points in the direction of a transcendental idealism? (shrink)

Philosophical arguments often assume that the folk tends towards moral objectivism. Although recent psychological studies have indicated that lay persons’ attitudes to morality are best characterized in terms of non-objectivism-leaning pluralism, it has been maintained that the folk may be committed to moral objectivism _implicitly_. Since the studies conducted so far almost exclusively assessed subjects’ metaethical attitudes via explicit cognitions, the strength of this rebuttal remains unclear. The current study attempts to test the folk’s implicit metaethical commitments. We present results (...) of a newly developed Implicit Association Test (IAT) for metaethical attitudes which indicate that the folk generally tend towards moral non-objectivism on the implicit level as well. We discuss implications of this finding for the philosophical debate. (shrink)

SummaryThe Admonition Controversy, largely between Thomas Cartwright and John Whitgift has proven fecund ground for intellectual historians analysing the religious dimension to early-modern political ideas. This paper argues that the religious dimension of Cartwright's mixed constitutionalism needs better explanation, rather than just noting that his ecclesiastical mixed constitutionalism mirrors his political mixed constitutionalism. This paper tracks Cartwright's progressive, dialogical unfolding of his mixed constitutionalism in response to Whitgift's attempt to derive episcopacy from the fact of English monarchy, effectively discrediting (...) the Admonition to Parliament. Furthermore, the essay outlines how the Cartwright–Whitgift debate led Cartwright to emphasise a parliamentarist mixed constitution when most of his contemporaries, especially the more famous mixed constitutionalist, Thomas Smith, portrayed the English parliament leaning noticeably towards the monarch. This analysis accepts that religious polemic was a major driving force in the normalisation of parliamentarism, yet seeks to show exactly how this worked out in one of the most important church–state disputes in Elizabethan England. (shrink)

Cooper’s book criticizes the traditional "absolutist" Christian doctrine of God, as exemplified in Aquinas, and concludes with a constructive chapter on "Redemption and Process Theism." His critique is chiefly Hartshornean, not Whiteheadian in character. Cooper, adding nothing of substance to Hartshorne’s extant critique, instead scrutinizes the Thomistic texts to show just how and where the difficulties noted by Hartshorne arise. The final chapter, which leans heavily on Whitehead is chiefly a summary of the usual charges against process theism, together with (...) most of the standard process replies. The deepest difficulty, as the author sees it, lies in showing that Whitehead’s God can guarantee ultimate security or redemption in the face of ineradicable pain and evil; to show this requires reconceiving nature and redemption as well as God. Here Cooper is perhaps open to charges of occasional misinterpretation: For example, is it true that for Whitehead the fact of divine existence is "an ultimate irrationality,... an everlasting given"? And can actuality be separated from concreteness? (shrink)

A lean hylomorphism stands as a metaphysical holy grail. An embarrassing feature of traditional hylomorphic ontologies is prime matter. Prime matter is both so basic that it cannot be examined (in principle) and its engagement with the other hylomorphic elements is far from clear. One particular problem posed by prime matter is how it is to be understood both as a principle of individuation for material substances and as pure potency. I present Thomas Aquinas’s way of squeezing some (...) intelligibility out of prime matter by modeling it on the idea of logical genus. Such a modeling provides insight into understanding prime matter as substratum, as maximally indeterminate, and as ontologically vague. One of the unusual but exciting things that fall out from this analysis of prime matter is the Entirety Thesis: “For any substance x, if x has prime matter then the prime matter of x is the same* as x,” where ‘same*’ is understood as “indeterminately identical.”. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:714 BOOK REVIEWS learning; the Jesuits lean to the voluntarist. Possessed of a unitary academic model, he is really arguing for Aristotle's analogy of attribution. Apparently, no one of his 200 plus Jesuit contacts told him that Nastri prefer St. Thomas and his analogy of proper proportionality. The historian Daniel Boorstin spent 25 yeari!l writing his trilogy on The Americans. What emerges from this analysis? Boorstin points (...) out that Americans like ambiguity, that they function best amid flux; ambivalence becomes their proper medium. For this reason, I have accepted Nathaniel Hawthorne as our most central writer. He situates American questions within a landscape of chiaroscuro. The Jesuit experience in the United States belongs essentially to the same landscape. But today, as formerly, it remains a landscape of questions. McDonough, on the other hand, has too many certitudes, too many answers, too much high definition-what Henry Adams regards as "mere facts." Instead of illuminating the landscape from within, his study inevitably recedes into the larger ambiguity reserved for what Wallace Stevens has called, " Prologues to what is possible." Saint Paul University Ottawa, Ontario JOHN P. McINTYRE, S.J. The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge. By LINDA TRINKAUS ZAGZEBSKI. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. viii + 215 pp. $29.95. As a Christian and a philosopher, Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski wants to understand why it is reasonable to affirm that we remain free despite God's infallible knowledge of our future acts. Moreover, she is not content simply to demonstrate that this affirmation involves no logical con· tradiction, for "reasonable people expect more" (p. 33) than a merely negative result. Hence the author sets herself the more ambitious task of working toward a positive solution that would explain why the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom is plausible and not a bare logical possibility. The hook sorts out recent opinions on the subject and sketches an original position that she hopes will advance the discussion. Zagzehski begins by constructing the most formidable version of the dilemma. Assuming that God is infallible and essentially omniscient, that the past has a kind of necessity that the future lacks ("accidental necessity"), and that this necessity can he transferred (in some sense) from the antecedent to the consequent of a conditional proposition, the dilemma may he stated as follows: BOOK REVIEWS (1) Necessarily, God believes at time t 1 that I will do S at t 3 if and only if I do S at t 3. (2) It is accidentally necessary at t 2 that God believes at t 1 that I will do S at t 3. (3) If (1) and (2) are true, then it is accidentally necessary at t 2 that I do Sat t 3. (4) It follows that it is accidentally necessary at t 2 that I do S at t 3. (5) But if it is accidentally necessary at t 2 that I do S at t 3, I do not do S at t 3 freely. (6) Therefore, I do not do S at t 3 freely. 715 Much of the first chapter is devoted to establishing that this form of the dilemma is more resistant to solution than any other, especially the so-called problem of future truth. Zagzebski goes on to evaluate three broad approaches to solving the dilemma. In Chapter 2 she takes up the " timelessness " solution. Its proponents, among whom the author numbers Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Eleonore Stump, and Norman Kretzmann, negate premise (2) of the foreknowledge dilemma by contending that God is not in time. Zagzebski considers this an acceptable negative solution to the dilemma and sees in it the potential to ground a more comprehensive, positive solution. Nonetheless, she refrains from subscribing wholeheartedly to the timelessness solution because it confronts one with a dilemma at least as perplexing as the one it solves. She puts the problem this way: like the past, eternity is fixed, for it is constituted by a state of affairs about which we cannot do anything; therefore my future acts are determined no less by God's timeless knowledge than by God's foreknowing them in a strictly temporal sense. In Chapter 3, Zagzebski considers... (shrink)

The paper leans on a movie cult from the 1960s, Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, of which a famous sequence is often mentioned, the one in which the protagonist, the photographer Thomas (considered here as a "conceptual character"), repeatedly enlarged the photographs he made in a park, in order to find an answer to the mystery surrounding the murder of a man: magnification which leads, on the one hand, to a gradual loss of definition of images, with the grain (...) of the picture becoming more and more evident, but also, on the other, in the emergence, from the very material of the print, of a fundamental detail that will help solve the mystery. What interests is the link between indicative referentiality and evidence documentary, between degrees of definition and authentication powers. The paper also analyzes the links that intertwine, in the film, between the photographs of Thomas (by Don McCullin) and paintings painted by another character of the movie, Bill (directed by Ian Stephenson), but also, outside the film, with all a series of examples from artistic production and visual culture of the time: very low definition images of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas (the famous Zapruder Film), the portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald directed by Sigmar Polke by simulating the halftone technique, the war photographs of Don McCullin and David Bailey's Fashion Photographs, Random Earths Studies by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, Materialologies and Texturologies by Jean Dubuffet, as well as Zen for Film by Nam June Paik. Fimiani's text addresses also two contemporary installations which have tried to return to the issues from the photographic sequence of Antonioni's film: Blow-Up Blow-Up (2010) by Joan Fontcuberta and Portrait Landscape (from the Object Classifier series) (2015) by John Houck, an installation in which photograms of Blow-Up are analyzed through facial recognition software. (shrink)

Interpretations of Aristotle's account of the relation between body and soul have been widely divergent. At one extreme, Thomas Slakey has said that in the De Anima ‘Aristotle tries to explain perception simply as an event in the sense-organs’. Wallace Matson has generalized the point. Of the Greeks in general he says, ‘Mind–body identity was taken for granted.… Indeed, in the whole classical corpus there exists no denial of the view that sensing is a bodily process throughout’. At the (...) opposite extreme, Friedrich Solmsen has said of Aristotle's theory, ‘it is doubtful whether the movement or the actualization occurring when the eye sees or the ear hears has any physical or physiological aspect.’ Similarly, Jonathan Barnes has described Aristotle as leaning hesitantly towards the view that desire and thought are wholly non-physical. But on the emotions and sense-perception, Barnes takes an intermediate position. Aristotle treats these, he says, as including physical and non-physical components. Other writers too have sought a position somewhere in the middle. Thus G. R. T. Ross concedes that we find in Aristotle ‘what looks like the crudest materialism’. It appears that objects produce changes in an organism, ‘and the reception of these changes in the sense organ is perception’. But, he maintains, this gives us only half the picture. The complete theory ‘may in a way be designated as a doctrine of psychophysical parallelism’. W. D. Ross also seeks a middle position. He thinks that Aristotle sometimes brings out ‘the distinctively mental, non-corporeal nature of the act [of sensation].… But Aristotle cannot be said to hold successfully to the notion of sensation as a purely mental activity having nothing in common with anything physical. He is still under the influence of earlier materialism’. (shrink)

Interpretations of Aristotle's account of the relation between body and soul have been widely divergent. At one extreme, Thomas Slakey has said that in theDe Anima‘Aristotle tries to explain perception simply as an event in the sense-organs’. Wallace Matson has generalized the point. Of the Greeks in general he says, ‘Mind–body identity was taken for granted.… Indeed, in the whole classical corpus there exists no denial of the view that sensing is a bodily process throughout’. At the opposite extreme, (...) Friedrich Solmsen has said of Aristotle's theory, ‘it is doubtful whether the movement or the actualization occurring when the eye sees or the ear hears has any physical or physiological aspect.’ Similarly, Jonathan Barnes has described Aristotle as leaning hesitantly towards the view that desire and thought are wholly non-physical. But on the emotions and sense-perception, Barnes takes an intermediate position. Aristotle treats these, he says, as including physical and non-physical components. Other writers too have sought a position somewhere in the middle. Thus G. R. T. Ross concedes that we find in Aristotle ‘what looks like the crudest materialism’. It appears that objects produce changes in an organism, ‘and the reception of these changes in the sense organisperception’. But, he maintains, this gives us only half the picture. The complete theory ‘may in a way be designated as a doctrine of psychophysical parallelism’. W. D. Ross also seeks a middle position. He thinks that Aristotle sometimes brings out ‘the distinctively mental, non-corporeal nature of the act [of sensation].… But Aristotle cannot be said to hold successfully to the notion of sensation as a purely mental activity having nothing in common with anything physical. He is still under the influence of earlier materialism’. (shrink)

Most contemporary interpreters of Aquinas have assumed that Thomas subscribed to a “non-repeatability principle” such that created entities, once destroyed entirely, cannot be “brought back" into existence, even by God's power. Souls persisting in the interim between death and resurrection thus play an essential identity-preserving role between our death and rising again. No separated souls, no resurrection. Two of Aquinas’s best medieval interpreters, however, reject this interpretation. Leaning largely on one of Aquinas’s late quodlibetal questions, they deny that (...) class='Hi'>Thomas held any non-repeatability principle strong enough to bar God’s resurrecting us even from complete destruction, souls and all. Here the chapter argues that careful analysis of the quodlibet and other texts largely vindicates the contemporary interpretation. It does so in a surprising way, however, since it turns out Aquinas’s non-repeatability principle applies only to corruptible, material entities like us, and not to incorruptible entities like angels. The reason Aquinas held this view, the chapter argues, is rooted in his theory of individuation. (shrink)

This volume is dedicated to the life and work of Ernest Nagel counted among the influential twentieth-century philosophers of science. Forgotten by the history of philosophy of science community in recent years, this volume introduces Nagel’s philosophy to a new generation of readers and highlights the merits and originality of his works. Best known in the history of philosophy as a major American representative of logical empiricism with some pragmatist and naturalist leanings, Nagel’s interests and activities went beyond these limits. (...) His career was marked with a strong and determined intention of harmonizing the European scientific worldview of logical empiricism and American naturalism/pragmatism. His most famous and systematic treatise on, The Structure of Science, appeared just one year before Thomas Kuhn’s even more renowned, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As a reflection of Nagel’s interdisciplinary work, the contributing authors’ articles are connected both historically and systematically. The volume will appeal to students mainly at the graduate level and academic scholars. Since the volume treats historical, philosophical, physical, social and general scientific questions, it will be of interest to historians and philosophers of science, epistemologists, social scientists, and anyone interested in the history of analytic philosophy and twentieth-century intellectual history. (shrink)

If you were to list the perennial issues in philosophy, the nature of time would no doubt be on that list. The essays in the present volume all touch upon the problem of time. The volume includes four contributions from different perspectives within the history of philosophy of time.Jani Hakkarainen and Todd Ryan delve into David Hume's account of time. Hume thinks there can be no time without succession. Consequently, unchanging, steadfast objects do not have a duration. They are stationary, (...) not subject to any change. Although they lack a duration, they coexist with a temporal succession. This introduces a problem: What is the relation between unchanging objects and time? Hakkarainen and Ryan draw on what they call Hume's Principle of Quantitative Comparison. Each indivisible temporal extent is equal to any other temporal extent; differences in duration are due to the different number of temporal parts. Steadfast objects may be thought to undergo a certain number of calculable changes when they are compared to ordinary successions we experience. This experience is provided, for example, by the ticking of a clock. We have the capacity to think that steadfast objects have precise durations. We humans nevertheless cannot give any deep explanation as how we come to this conclusion.Emily Thomas focuses on the graphic representation of time. Whereas the visual representation of time has typically been done with matrices or grids, Joseph Priestley represented time in a line in 1765. Priestley's line divides time “by an equal scale” into centuries. Many have interpreted this as being evidence of a Newtonian influence, as if there is an absolute time flowing equably. Thomas situates Priestley's position in the modern debates on the nature of our ideas. She argues that the absolutist reading does not have merit. Thomas thinks rather that Priestley sides with David Hartley, who explained how we acquire the ideas of duration and time from sensation. Thomas's essay advances our understanding of the history of space-time parallelism. With timelines, the analogy between time and space becomes a possibility. In my essay I assess Ernst Mach's criticism of Isaac Newton's substantivalist account of time. Newton's argument for absolute time relates to his mathematical-empirical physics and theology. In his Science of Mechanics, Mach largely neglects the laws of motion, calculus and the omnipresence theology that is at the background of Newton's concept of time. Mach did however criticize Newton's absolutist argument on the basis that the self-existing flow cannot be observed, measured, or experimented with, and he provided an alternative relational account of time. I point out that this was not only extreme positivism or phenomenalism, but an epistemology and ontology suited for the subsequent physical theories of relativity. Finally, I argue that Mach's denial of the independent atomic structure of matter should not be entirely assimilated to his denial of substantivalism about time. The two phenomena are different, so we should evaluate Mach's reasoning concerning them accordingly. Matyáš Moravec and Peter West go through Susan Stebbing's criticism of Arthur Eddington's popular account of the passage of time. Stebbing's target, Moravec and West argue, is Eddington's largely Bergsonian view on time. She objects to the view that our minds have “a private door” to the physical reality which no measurements can disclose. Stebbing believes that our experience of the passage of time belongs to our ordinary, every-day experience, and she thinks Eddington mystifies the whole idea by leaning on a peculiar form of introspection. Moravec and West build a case for Bergson's influence on Eddington, arguing that Bergson probably did contribute to Eddington's idea of “the intuition of becoming.” Both seem to think that we may access the dynamic temporal reality in ways not captured by scientific investigation, by means of an introspective internal experience of duration. As a final remark, I think I should note, with regret, that out of the six authors in this volume only one is a woman. Let the reader know that as an editor I tried to strike a better balance. I still trust that the quality of the articles is high, and most importantly, worthwhile for readers interested in the history of philosophy of time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning from Art:Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as a Critique of Divine DeterminismDennis Sansom (bio)Art's Critique of PhilosophyWe usually think the critic's role belongs to philosophy. That is, to understand art's essential characteristics and why and how we appreciate art, we need a philosophical explanation. Though our tastes for art are unique and personal, we typically think that to understand art we must first explain it. For example, Plato thought (...) he could explain art as an emotional inspiration for people, at best, or, at worse, a distortion of intelligible truths; therefore, according to Plato, art should be dismissed or censored in a society seeking social justice derived from the idea of justice. Aristotle understood art to be the imitation of nature; as an imitation, it needs clarification according to the purposes of nature, and philosophy clarifies these purposes. In either case, art needs to be critiqued by philosophy. It is customary to hear philosophical critics lecture on art rather than artists lecture on philosophy.But can art critique philosophy? Is it possible for art to provide a scrutiny of philosophy that perhaps a particular philosophy cannot give itself? I think art can provide this critique by using a feature that some philosophers have thought to be art's limitation to clear reasoning—the imagination. Though philosophers like John Dewey recognize the importance and influence of imagination on our moral and aesthetical orientation to the world of experience, typically Thomas Hobbes's view of imagination prevails in the empiricist-leaning philosophers (for instance, David Hume and Bertrand Russell): the imagination is about image recollection and hence necessary for connecting our ideas to empirical experiences. But for this latter approach, the imagination does not inform us about the world; rather it only bridges experience to abstract ideas. What is important, then, is proper understanding. For this approach, the main question is, Can we explain the world based upon our clearest account of the role of understanding? [End Page 1] Whether this account relies upon a psychological model of the brain's workings, a scientific model of successful theory formation, or a logical model reflective of truth relation possibilities, we need philosophy to clarify how we gain knowledge, even in art.Yet, this approach shortchanges analysis. Psychology, empirical science, and logic are not the only ways to analyze an idea. If a philosophy pretends to explain our experience of the world, then the philosophy opens itself to this question: Is the idea worth holding to be true according to our experiences of the world? A philosophical claim may be logically consistent, based upon generalizations of experience, and be coherent with acceptable views of God, the self, or morality, but if we envision the claim lived out within our experience of the world, would we want to accept it? Is it the kind of life we would want? It takes imagination to answer these questions, and the artist through her or his unique technique and representation can test the existential worth of an idea.Hobbes's description of the imagination represents only one way to explain it. Imagination is more than an act of memory and recollection. It is also reconstruction. John Dewey's definition highlights this role: "An imaginative experience is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world."1 Imagination is always an interpretation of what the world could look like. It not only mirrors but heightens experience to focus on a certain viewpoint about the possible meaning of life. By doing this, the imagination enables us to explore whether certain ideas are worth keeping. That is, if we could picture living this way, would we want to live it?Because imagination occupies a central role in artistic creativity, art provides a useful means of analyzing philosophical claims about the world. Though a philosopher may be able to present an idea that is logically consistent, clear in its categories of quantity, quality, being, modality, and so on, explicit in all its assumptions, and even "clear and distinct," when the idea is imagined in life situations, it can lose its... (shrink)

Constitutions enshrine the fundamental values of a people and they build a framework for a state’s public policy. With regard to generational change, their endurance gives rise to two interlinked concerns: the sovereignty concern and the forgone welfare concern. If constitutions are intergenerational contracts, how (in)flexible should they be? This article discusses perpetual constitutions, sunset constitutions, constitutional reform commissions and constitutional conventions, both historically and analytically. It arrives at the conclusion that very rigid constitutions are incompatible with the principle of (...) intergenerational justice. Recurring constitutional reform commissions in fixed time intervals would give each generation of citizens a say without leaning too much to the side of flexibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning from Art:Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as a Critique of Divine DeterminismDennis Sansom (bio)Art's Critique of PhilosophyWe usually think the critic's role belongs to philosophy. That is, to understand art's essential characteristics and why and how we appreciate art, we need a philosophical explanation. Though our tastes for art are unique and personal, we typically think that to understand art we must first explain it. For example, Plato thought (...) he could explain art as an emotional inspiration for people, at best, or, at worse, a distortion of intelligible truths; therefore, according to Plato, art should be dismissed or censored in a society seeking social justice derived from the idea of justice. Aristotle understood art to be the imitation of nature; as an imitation, it needs clarification according to the purposes of nature, and philosophy clarifies these purposes. In either case, art needs to be critiqued by philosophy. It is customary to hear philosophical critics lecture on art rather than artists lecture on philosophy.But can art critique philosophy? Is it possible for art to provide a scrutiny of philosophy that perhaps a particular philosophy cannot give itself? I think art can provide this critique by using a feature that some philosophers have thought to be art's limitation to clear reasoning—the imagination. Though philosophers like John Dewey recognize the importance and influence of imagination on our moral and aesthetical orientation to the world of experience, typically Thomas Hobbes's view of imagination prevails in the empiricist-leaning philosophers (for instance, David Hume and Bertrand Russell): the imagination is about image recollection and hence necessary for connecting our ideas to empirical experiences. But for this latter approach, the imagination does not inform us about the world; rather it only bridges experience to abstract ideas. What is important, then, is proper understanding. For this approach, the main question is, Can we explain the world based upon our clearest account of the role of understanding? [End Page 1] Whether this account relies upon a psychological model of the brain's workings, a scientific model of successful theory formation, or a logical model reflective of truth relation possibilities, we need philosophy to clarify how we gain knowledge, even in art.Yet, this approach shortchanges analysis. Psychology, empirical science, and logic are not the only ways to analyze an idea. If a philosophy pretends to explain our experience of the world, then the philosophy opens itself to this question: Is the idea worth holding to be true according to our experiences of the world? A philosophical claim may be logically consistent, based upon generalizations of experience, and be coherent with acceptable views of God, the self, or morality, but if we envision the claim lived out within our experience of the world, would we want to accept it? Is it the kind of life we would want? It takes imagination to answer these questions, and the artist through her or his unique technique and representation can test the existential worth of an idea.Hobbes's description of the imagination represents only one way to explain it. Imagination is more than an act of memory and recollection. It is also reconstruction. John Dewey's definition highlights this role: "An imaginative experience is what happens when varied materials of sense quality, emotion, and meaning come together in a union that marks a new birth in the world."1 Imagination is always an interpretation of what the world could look like. It not only mirrors but heightens experience to focus on a certain viewpoint about the possible meaning of life. By doing this, the imagination enables us to explore whether certain ideas are worth keeping. That is, if we could picture living this way, would we want to live it?Because imagination occupies a central role in artistic creativity, art provides a useful means of analyzing philosophical claims about the world. Though a philosopher may be able to present an idea that is logically consistent, clear in its categories of quantity, quality, being, modality, and so on, explicit in all its assumptions, and even "clear and distinct," when the idea is imagined in life situations, it can lose its... (shrink)

Sometime in 1355 the Northumbrian knight Sir Thomas Gray, meditating an ambition to write a history of England during his imprisonment by the Scots in Edinburgh, dreamed a dream. In it a Sibyl appears, to tutor him in his historical project. She takes him to a ladder leaning against a high wall in an orchard. As he climbs each of four rungs, he sees, through an opening in the wall, Walter, archdeacon of Exeter; Bede; the author of the Polychronicon (...) ; and the vicar of Tynemouth, author of the Historia aurea. The Sibyl explains that these writers cover the respective stages of insular history. The fifth and last rung concerns the future and is not for Sir Thomas to climb—the Sibyl quotes two prophecies, one by Merlin, and observes that deciphering them should be left to the divines. When the Sibyl instructs Gray to call his work Scalacronica— referring thus not only to the scaling ladder he is standing on but to his family arms—she makes his task clear: his history is to traverse the periods represented by the four figures and others, in a compilatory work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 313-333 [Access article in PDF] Vestige of the Third Force: Willem Bilderdijk, Poet, Anti-Skeptic, Millenarian Joris van Eijnatten One of the unfortunate consequences of Babel is that only the Dutch read Dutch poetry. 1 Although English-speaking historians may have heard of the seventeenth-century poet Joost van den Vondel, who generally qualifies as the greatest literary artist of the Netherlands, virtually no (...) one outside Holland knows Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831), poet, jurist, and man of learning. Robert Southey, having met the poet at his home in Leiden in 1825, lamented several years later the fact that Bilderdijk's fame had not traversed national boundaries: "And who is Bilderdyk?" methinks thou sayest: A ready question; yet which, trust me, Allan, Would not be asked, had not the curse that came From Babel, clipt the wings of Poetry. 2When Southey sojourned in the Netherlands, Bilderdijk had already established his reputation as one of the few unconventional figures in Dutch history, comparable, in this sense, to Coornhert and Spinoza. The most outstanding poet of his age, he dominated nineteenth-century Dutch literature through his versatility, rhetorical prowess and sheer output. He is reputed to have written 300,000 lines of verse, not counting his unpublished poems. He practiced virtually all literary genres, from Pindaric odes and erotic rhyme to didactic poetry. Versed in the classics, he wrote numerous translations of, among many others, Homer, Sophocles, Anacreon, Callimachus, Horace, and Ovid. Bilderdijk was a prolific [End Page 313] writer of essays on subjects ranging from moral philosophy, epistemology, and natural law to aesthetics, architecture, and botany. He translated theological and devotional works, including Thomas Chalmers's Evidence and Authority of the Christian Revelation, Chrysostome's sermons, and books on freemasonry and pneumatology. Besides contributing to perspective drawing, he wrote the first geological study in Dutch. His History of the Fatherland appeared posthumously in thirteen volumes. He himself regarded his linguistic studies and literary essays as his main achievement. Bilderdijk filled thousands of pages with his idiosyncratic views on the gender of nouns, the alphabet, grammar, spelling, medieval manuscripts, tragedy, and drama in general.Not surprisingly, Bilderdijk's varied interests and comprehensive mind have led to different interpretations of his thought. Most are one of two kinds. Writers subscribing to the first interpretation regard him as a somewhat strange but devout apologist for Calvinist orthodoxy. They stress the fact that Bilderdijk was the only intellectual who, in the midst of the soul-destroying rationalism propounded by a complacent liberal establishment, dared to cry out against Revolution and Enlightenment, thus revivifying the religious heart of the nation. 3 Those who follow the second interpretation emphasize the Romantic nature of his thought. This group tends to look upon Bilderdijk as the only true Dutch Romantic, a Wordsworth and Coleridge combined, a metaphysical if rather erratic genius who outgrew the intellectual marshlands of his native country. Writers in this tradition stress his definition of poetry as a spontaneous overflow of feeling, his linguistic achievements, his preoccupation with geology, and his visionary view of Dutch history. 4 One major interpreter, commenting on Bilderdijk's "real position as a philosopher," has stated that "to me there can be no doubt that Bilderdijk should be placed among the post-Kantian idealists like Fichte and Schelling (cf., again, Coleridge!)." 5Such statements are largely products of wishful thinking. Bilderdijk was not a devout Calvinist. He hardly ever went to church, his theology exhibits suspiciously heterodox leanings, and his professed adherence to the doctrine of predestination had less to do with a profound knowledge of the articles of Dort than mystical resignation. Similarly, the depiction of Bilderdijk as a post-Kantian idealist is sympathetic but lacks any evidence. Some literary historians have [End Page 314] tried to salvage the "Romantic" nature of his poetry, but the result is not particularly convincing. 6"And who is Bilderdijk," to echo Southey, if he was neither a Calvinist nor a Romantic? How should one interpret his thought? What should one do... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Summa Contra Gentiles and Aquinas's Way to GodGaven KerrThere is to be found in Aquinas's writings a way to God which is his own and most personal. This way to God is the way from existence (esse) and arrives at God as pure existence itself, the fount of all being, without which nothing would be. It is deployed in several contexts ranging from the De ente et essentia (...) to the Summa theologiae [ST]. Yet, in the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], it is peculiarly absent. The proofs of God's existence which Aquinas offers in the latter are almost exclusively drawn from Aristotle, and they do not exhibit any of the refined metaphysical thinking about esse that characterizes Thomas's thinking about God in other works.1 For a work that is intended to be both apologetical in nature and explicitly philosophical from the outset, this is strange. Thomas is always at home in his own metaphysics of esse, and he deploys it with ease and finesse especially when demonstrating God's existence and discussing the divine nature. But in the SCG his proofs of God's existence and the subsequent reasoning about the divine nature are awkward and, one could even say, clumsy. Why did he not just dispense with the Aristotelian thinking on motion and movers and all the clarifications that involves? Why not simply stick with his own favored account of act and potency interpreted in terms of the metaphysics of esse?In the current paper I wish to address these issues. I shall begin with an account of what I take to be Aquinas's way to God and why I think it is [End Page 1273] his way to God. Having done that, I will then address the issue as to why this way to God does not appear in the SCG reasoning, but slowly emerges only after God's existence has been demonstrated. I shall conclude that the apologetical and consciously philosophical nature of the SCG offer us an insight into why Thomas did not lean on his metaphysics of esse in his (initial) discussions of God there.Aquinas's Way to GodAquinas famously argues that there is a distinction between essence and esse in things. The context of this distinction is that of universal hylemorphism, which holds that in all composite things there are two principles: a principle of potency and a principle of actuality. In traditional Aristotelian fashion, defenders of universal hylemorphism held that the principle of actuality in a thing is its form, whereas the principle of potency is its matter.2 All things other than God are composed of matter and form, since all things other than God have some element of potency. But to locate the potentiality of anything other than God in the matter of the thing creates a problem when it comes to separated substances (angels) and the immaterial rational soul. Such substances (or components of substances in the case of the rational soul) are taken to be separated from matter and all material conditions. Nonetheless they are created and thereby dependent on God, so they must have some potentiality.So how do we attribute matter—that is, potency—to separate substances?According to defenders of universal hylemorphism, the answer is to distinguish between corporeal matter and incorporeal matter. The former is the kind of physical matter that we typically take to be the matter of things, whereas the latter is a kind of non-physical matter which the separate substances possess. Thus, it is not proper to say that such substances are [End Page 1274] immaterial, but rather that whilst material they are incorporeal. Universal hylemorphism has the advantage that it neatly distinguishes all things from God by isolating a principle of potency (matter) which all things other than God have. Nevertheless, universal hylemorphism presents problems of its own, not least the thorny one of making intelligible just what exactly a real (as opposed to conceptual) kind of matter is that is incorporeal.Aquinas for his part rejected universal hylemorphism from his earliest writings.3 He holds that it is precisely because separated substances are separated from all material conditions that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 459-460 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Brandt. Philosophie in Bildern: Von Giorgione bis Magritte. Hamburg: Dumont, 2000. Pp. 470. Paper, NP. Reinhard Brandt, professor for Philosophiegeschichte, offers in his latest book a multi-faceted history of philosophy and art through his detailed interpretations of major paintings in the European tradition, beginning with Giorgione's "The Three Philosophers" and a young Raphael's "The Dream (...) of the Knight,"and stretching to René Magritte's "La condition humaine." In these paintings, as Brandt claims, different philosophical positions are expounded, which he then, in the role of interpreter, attempts to elucidate.In the introduction Brandt explains how this paradoxical phenomenon of philosophizing paintings can even exist. That one can find not only philosophical themes but well-wrought positions in such paintings, and, most importantly, not read these positions into them, is shown in more than thirty short essays, spanning from ancient Greek philosophy and literature, through the Renaissance and on to present-day Italian, French, Spanish, and German literature/philosophy. In almost every interpretation, Brandt critically reviews previous research, exposing and correcting some deeply rooted mistakes and constantly providing new impulses; in light of his philosophical-philological method, some major paintings in the European tradition are interpreted anew.His detailed analysis of Raphael's "The School of Athens" forces a persuasive revision of previous interpretations; the sitting figure in the foreground is not, as previously assumed, Heraclitus, but Democritus. On account of this carefully proven and convincing allotment, an unnoticed field of vision is discovered between the materialist and solid-state physicist Democritus, who with the gestus melancholicus is concentrating on a problem, and Plato, standing perpendicularly over him. Could this problem be the stone cube, on which the philosopher is leaning? From this conjecture we now have a bridge leading to Albrecht Dürer's engraving "Melancholia."Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas" is interpreted anew on account of the surprising solution to the painting's puzzling construction. Brandt shows that the whole picture is viewed from the vantage point of the princess inside the painting, not of an observer outside it. The princess stands before a mirror and Velazquez paints everything exactly as the princess sees it. So the painting, which hangs in the Prado Museum, is the mirror image of a complete reflection of the Self; perhaps it is no coincidence that the painting belongs to the same historical period as Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum dictum. Or Jacques Louis David's "The Death of Socrates": although the painting has been correctly referred back to Plato's Phaidon, until now a Platonic ground position was falsely attributed to the painting. Brandt shows that the painting was conceived with Stoic philosophical positions in mind: death is portrayed as immanently present, coupled with the un-Socratic maxim mortem spernere. The virtuous stance that Socrates still shows on the threshold of death is decisive. And as an added bonus he includes his influential, previously published essay on the title-page emblem of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is Brandt's technical know-how. He combines an encyclopedic knowledge of the European intellectual tradition with a [End Page 459] fluid, easy-to-read style, which not only instructs the reader, but entertains as well. At no time does this book approach mere philosophical pedantry; his treatment of some of the lesser known, albeit important, figures in the history of philosophy, e.g., Justus Lipsius and Diogenes of Sinope, is not a lesson in obscurity. The reader feels himself taken on a journey through a history of Western philosophy, always being provided with thought-provoking material. His style, however, is in no way used to mask the often shaky scholarship that has a tendency to go hand-in-hand with such interdisciplinary studies. In every essay Brandt exhausts all the sources; he works with razor-sharp exactness, proceeding with the meticulousness of an outstanding and seasoned scholar.A problem which always accompanies such books is the question: Cui bono? Are either the philosophers... (shrink)

Although famous as an economist, Amartya Sen is no less distinguished as a philosopher. In this he is far from unique. The same went for the founding father of economics, Adam Smith. But in these days of increased academic specialization the combination of philosopher and economist is rarer than once it was. Moreover the philosophical contributions of contemporary economists, such as they are, tend to be relatively narrow. Some, notably John Harsanyi and Thomas Schelling, are rightly lauded by philosophers (...) for helping to illuminate what Hegel called ‘the cunning of reason’ – the strange twists, loops, and blind alleys that obstruct or divert us, individually or collectively, in the pursuit of value. When it comes to the identification of the value to be pursued, on the other hand, it is harder to think of recent economists who have done important work. The preference-based theory of value treated as axiomatic by many economists is regarded as comic by many moral philosophers, even those with otherwise consilient utilitarian leanings. To break loose from the preference-based theory of value, while continuing to carry credibility for pioneering work in economics, takes a person of truly exceptional imagination, discipline, and versatility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Meanings and Function of Anti-System Ideology in the Weimar RepublicBen LiebermanThere are few, if any, ideological terms in the extensive historiography of the Weimar Republic so omnipresent and yet at the same time so obscure as the word “system.” Historical accounts of the Weimar Republic are strewn with references to the “system.” In recent works on the Weimar Republic Hagen Schulze points to the opposition of bourgeois (bürgerliche) (...) parties to the “Weimar ‘system,’ “ Detlev Peukert notes “hatred of ‘the system,’ the political and social order of the Republic”; Knut Borchardt observes the loss of faith in the capacity of “the system” to satisfy expectations; and Hans Mommsen refers to the “political system,” the “party system” and the “parliamentary system.” 1Historians, whatever their other differences, agree that mounting opposition to the System weakened the Weimar Republic, but the usefulness of this observation requires analysis of the meaning or meanings of the System. What, then, was the Weimar System? Surprisingly, many accounts of the Weimar Republic do not even attempt to provide a definition of the System, and the term receives only cursory treatment in several specialized works on ideology of the Weimar era. 2 Anti-System politics does receive attention, but Thomas [End Page 355] Childers’s insightful and pioneering essay on “anti-system politics” concentrates on mobilization against the System rather than on the problem of defining it. 3The best existing analysis of the System in Kurt Sontheimer’s valuable study of anti-democratic thought in the Weimar Republic suggests that historians cannot take the meaning of the term as a given. Sontheimer establishes that the System formed part of the array of anti-democratic thought of the Weimar Republic, but he also notes that the term’s meaning cannot easily be pinned down. The System conveyed a variety of political and economic meanings and ultimately formed a “nationalist counter myth.” 4During the Weimar Republic, attacks against the System emanated from a wide range of sources, most notably from a variety of nationalists as well as from Communists. Nationalists of many leanings detested the System. The DNVP (German National People’s Party), the largest political party of the right for most of the Weimar Republic, hated the System. So, too, did conservative revolutionaries and völkisch (ethnic or racist nationalist) groups including nationalist associations and the National Socialists. At the other end of the political spectrum, attacks against the System also surfaced in the pronouncements of the KPD (German Communist Party). 5No single ideological line of attack doomed the Weimar Republic, but use by an extraordinarily broad range of political groups lent tremendous force to anti-System discourse. Adopted by foes who sometimes agreed on little else, the System was the targets of repeated attacks spread across the German political spectrum and called into question Weimar legitimacy. Analyzing this broad pattern of use raises several tasks. As a prelude to investigating anti-System terminology, it is necessary to map out the patterns of use of the System during the Weimar Republic. The very ability of rival groups to adopt anti-System suggests that the System incorporated varied meanings.Beyond investigating the meaning or meanings of the System, an analysis of anti-System terminology should also explore the appeal and influence of anti-System terminology. Why did such a broad range of groups adopt anti-System discourse, and how did acceptance of anti-System terminology help to discredit the Weimar Republic and designate alternatives for Germany’s future? [End Page 356]Describing Weimar’s perceived failings, anti-System terminology simultaneously provided a partial guide to a presumably-better Germany without the System. The System came to envelop many institutions of German public life, but attention should also be paid to spaces left unoccupied by the System. What, if any, institutions or structures of public life were left untainted by the broad wave of attacks against the System? If the hated System could be swept away, what would be left in its place? It is noteworthy that the many enemies of the System generally desired a strong state.Exploring the effects of broad attacks against the System, analysis of the System should also... (shrink)

Now available in a Harper Colophon edition, this classic book has revolutionized thinking throughout the Western world about the nature of the psychiatric profession and the moral implications of its practices. Book jacket.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate RaworthYoko NagaseKate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. London: Random House Business Books, 2017. 372 pp. £20. ISBN 9781847941374.Question: Is this a book about utopia? Answer: Yes, indeed; it is a book about a twenty-first-century utopia represented by the Doughnut.The author presents a vision of a pragmatic utopia, represented by the (...) inside of her Doughnut that is both distributive and regenerative. According to the author, a distributive economy is "one whose dynamics tend to disperse and circulate value as it is created, rather than concentrating it in ever-fewer hands." A regenerative economy is "one in which people become full participants in regenerating Earth's life-giving cycles so that we thrive within planetary boundaries" (156).The emphasis on the fair distribution of income, wealth, and means of production is an ideal pursued by famous utopians, from perfectly equal distribution of everything in Thomas More's Utopia to very libertarian position of "whatever he has justly made he has a right to keep" by H. G. Wells.1 The distributive Doughnut community aims to enable individuals to be, in Amartya Sen's words, "healthy, empowered and creative—so that they can choose to be and do things in life that they value" (43). This ideal of individuals' rights to choose their life and to realise their ends is the centerpiece of libertarians' ideal society.2 The Doughnut, however, leans heavily toward democratic socialism. Arguments for redistributive measures such as a universal basic income and taxes on land and wealth put forward by the author go beyond promoting equal opportunity and emphasize the necessity of economic means to make the best out of the opportunities (164, 180, 200). [End Page 528]The issue of sustainability at the global level is a concept that does not appear in the classical utopian literature, even though the idea of living happily in perpetuity is very much the tenet of many classical utopian societies. Given the extent of the geographical knowledge that existed by the time Wells explored his idea of a utopia, he was no longer able to set it in some not-yetdiscovered place on Earth like his predecessors did—hence the adaptation of "another planet."3 But this setup had nothing to do with the concept of the ecological limit of Earth. Pre-nineteenth-century utopians would be familiar with the contents of the Doughnut's foundation, the inner shell that consists of the social and economic factors such as food, health, education, and housing. However, the outer shell of the Doughnut is very twenty-first century, enclosing the nine planetary boundaries of the Doughnut as a life-support system, such as ozone layer depletion, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, and climate change (44–48).The author points out that we need to get a grip on understanding how we belong in the world. Instead of relying on the power of words as George Orwell's Thought Police, the author takes full advantage of the power of the visual, by drawing the Doughnut as a map for a new economy and society.4 If studying economics is tantamount to "mastering the mother tongue of public policy" (287), Doughnut Economics is a critical introduction to and the foundation of economic, environmental, and social policymaking.Rather than utopias as purely thought exercise by Plato or More, Raworth, like David Hume, presents a model of a utopia that is meant to be achievable.5 The economics of the Doughnut does not depend on any unrealistic assumptions of human nature. The author proposes means to reaching inside the Doughnut without abolishing the market system or private property rights. But a strong emphasis is placed on additional redistributive policies and regulations that are deemed critical toward sustainability. This position is consistent with that of the former chancellor of Germany who reportedly said that she "wanted as much market economics as possible, but as much state intervention as necessary."6 In promoting the open-source circular economy movement, the author wonders if it may seem "unfeasibly utopian" (231). Yet given the pace... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 313-333 [Access article in PDF] Vestige of the Third Force: Willem Bilderdijk, Poet, Anti-Skeptic, Millenarian Joris van Eijnatten One of the unfortunate consequences of Babel is that only the Dutch read Dutch poetry. 1 Although English-speaking historians may have heard of the seventeenth-century poet Joost van den Vondel, who generally qualifies as the greatest literary artist of the Netherlands, virtually no (...) one outside Holland knows Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831), poet, jurist, and man of learning. Robert Southey, having met the poet at his home in Leiden in 1825, lamented several years later the fact that Bilderdijk's fame had not traversed national boundaries: "And who is Bilderdyk?" methinks thou sayest: A ready question; yet which, trust me, Allan, Would not be asked, had not the curse that came From Babel, clipt the wings of Poetry. 2When Southey sojourned in the Netherlands, Bilderdijk had already established his reputation as one of the few unconventional figures in Dutch history, comparable, in this sense, to Coornhert and Spinoza. The most outstanding poet of his age, he dominated nineteenth-century Dutch literature through his versatility, rhetorical prowess and sheer output. He is reputed to have written 300,000 lines of verse, not counting his unpublished poems. He practiced virtually all literary genres, from Pindaric odes and erotic rhyme to didactic poetry. Versed in the classics, he wrote numerous translations of, among many others, Homer, Sophocles, Anacreon, Callimachus, Horace, and Ovid. Bilderdijk was a prolific [End Page 313] writer of essays on subjects ranging from moral philosophy, epistemology, and natural law to aesthetics, architecture, and botany. He translated theological and devotional works, including Thomas Chalmers's Evidence and Authority of the Christian Revelation, Chrysostome's sermons, and books on freemasonry and pneumatology. Besides contributing to perspective drawing, he wrote the first geological study in Dutch. His History of the Fatherland appeared posthumously in thirteen volumes. He himself regarded his linguistic studies and literary essays as his main achievement. Bilderdijk filled thousands of pages with his idiosyncratic views on the gender of nouns, the alphabet, grammar, spelling, medieval manuscripts, tragedy, and drama in general.Not surprisingly, Bilderdijk's varied interests and comprehensive mind have led to different interpretations of his thought. Most are one of two kinds. Writers subscribing to the first interpretation regard him as a somewhat strange but devout apologist for Calvinist orthodoxy. They stress the fact that Bilderdijk was the only intellectual who, in the midst of the soul-destroying rationalism propounded by a complacent liberal establishment, dared to cry out against Revolution and Enlightenment, thus revivifying the religious heart of the nation. 3 Those who follow the second interpretation emphasize the Romantic nature of his thought. This group tends to look upon Bilderdijk as the only true Dutch Romantic, a Wordsworth and Coleridge combined, a metaphysical if rather erratic genius who outgrew the intellectual marshlands of his native country. Writers in this tradition stress his definition of poetry as a spontaneous overflow of feeling, his linguistic achievements, his preoccupation with geology, and his visionary view of Dutch history. 4 One major interpreter, commenting on Bilderdijk's "real position as a philosopher," has stated that "to me there can be no doubt that Bilderdijk should be placed among the post-Kantian idealists like Fichte and Schelling (cf., again, Coleridge!)." 5Such statements are largely products of wishful thinking. Bilderdijk was not a devout Calvinist. He hardly ever went to church, his theology exhibits suspiciously heterodox leanings, and his professed adherence to the doctrine of predestination had less to do with a profound knowledge of the articles of Dort than mystical resignation. Similarly, the depiction of Bilderdijk as a post-Kantian idealist is sympathetic but lacks any evidence. Some literary historians have [End Page 314] tried to salvage the "Romantic" nature of his poetry, but the result is not particularly convincing. 6"And who is Bilderdijk," to echo Southey, if he was neither a Calvinist nor a Romantic? How should one interpret his thought? What should one do... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 172-176 [Access article in PDF] The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication. Ross Wolin. Series ed. Thomas W. Benson. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 256. $34.95, cloth. Ross Wolin's The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke offers its readers an interesting mix of intellectual history and conceptual explication, along with an element of biography, which Wolin (...) performs in an effort to trace the movements of Burke's thought as it developed over time within particular socio-political circumstances. The book is divided into three parts, each corresponding to Wolin's three-part division of Burke's intellectual [End Page 172] career. Part I, "Towards a Better Life through Art, Criticism and Politics," begins with a chapter on Burke's formation as a critic in the bohemian, avant-garde culture of post-World War I Greenwich Village. Wolin offers an account of how the dynamics of this social milieu prompted Burke to incorporate politics into his already established aesthetic interests, and of this fusion's manifestation in left-leaning periodicals of the time. While some might be tempted to see this first chapter as having limited value in comparison to Jack Selzer's richly detailed Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village : Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-1931, it should be noted that Wolin does a fine job of helping his readers—in chapter one and those which follow—to understand explicitly how specific contexts shaped Burke's ideas and his rhetoric (something that Selzer's book does not do). Wolin is particularly adept at showing how, for Burke, there is an inextricable link between aesthetics, rhetoric, politics, and social life in general. This aesthetic-rhetorical connection to politics and life, argues Wolin, is key to understanding all of Burke's work. According to Wolin, equally important is how this connection informed the essays that comprised Burke's Counter-Statement, which Wolin sees as the seed from which all of Burke's theoretical and critical writings grew. For Wolin, to understand Burke one must understand Counter-Statement, and understand it within the historical circumstances that prompted and shaped its concepts and their rhetorical presentation.Chapter two is thus devoted to a discussion of the significance of Counter-Statement within Burke's oeuvre. It is in Counter-Statement, Wolin contends, that one can discern not only the fundaments of Burke's later work but also the "Critics Credo" that organized Burke's rhetorical efforts from Permanence and Change to The Rhetoric of Religion. Wolin's attempt to demonstrate the operation of this credo in all of Burke's books as an organizing principle pushes the limits of credulity at times, but readers should not let this obscure the insight Wolin offers us into Burke's responses to and interventions in early twentieth-century intellectual culture. Chapters three, four, and five comprise Part II of Wolin's book, "The Tactics of Conflict and Cooperation," which discusses in succession the three books that followed Counter-Statement chronologically: Permanence and Change, Attitudes Towards History, and The Philosophy of Literary Form. In these chapters, Wolin makes numerous interesting and novel points about Burke's thought. In the chapter on Permanence and Change, for example, Wolin highlights the conception of ethics implicit in that work, one that has its roots in poetics (particularly tragedy) and which refuses "to supplant traditional [End Page 173] ethics with another system [that is] equally fixed" (77). Although he does not state this, implicit in Wolin's reading is the suggestion that within Burke's work lies an alternative to the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and Habermasian universal pragmatics so many rhetorical scholars seem to embrace when theorizing a rhetorical ethics. (A "dramatistic" ethics of discourse and public life is, I think, an untapped potential of Burke's work.) Part III, "The Tactics of Motivation," offers similarly insightful and contextualized readings of A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, The Rhetoric of Religion, and Language as Symbolic Action. Particularly interesting is Wolin's discussion in chapter seven of the importance of style... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 313-333 [Access article in PDF] Vestige of the Third Force: Willem Bilderdijk, Poet, Anti-Skeptic, Millenarian Joris van Eijnatten One of the unfortunate consequences of Babel is that only the Dutch read Dutch poetry. 1 Although English-speaking historians may have heard of the seventeenth-century poet Joost van den Vondel, who generally qualifies as the greatest literary artist of the Netherlands, virtually no (...) one outside Holland knows Willem Bilderdijk (1756-1831), poet, jurist, and man of learning. Robert Southey, having met the poet at his home in Leiden in 1825, lamented several years later the fact that Bilderdijk's fame had not traversed national boundaries: "And who is Bilderdyk?" methinks thou sayest: A ready question; yet which, trust me, Allan, Would not be asked, had not the curse that came From Babel, clipt the wings of Poetry. 2When Southey sojourned in the Netherlands, Bilderdijk had already established his reputation as one of the few unconventional figures in Dutch history, comparable, in this sense, to Coornhert and Spinoza. The most outstanding poet of his age, he dominated nineteenth-century Dutch literature through his versatility, rhetorical prowess and sheer output. He is reputed to have written 300,000 lines of verse, not counting his unpublished poems. He practiced virtually all literary genres, from Pindaric odes and erotic rhyme to didactic poetry. Versed in the classics, he wrote numerous translations of, among many others, Homer, Sophocles, Anacreon, Callimachus, Horace, and Ovid. Bilderdijk was a prolific [End Page 313] writer of essays on subjects ranging from moral philosophy, epistemology, and natural law to aesthetics, architecture, and botany. He translated theological and devotional works, including Thomas Chalmers's Evidence and Authority of the Christian Revelation, Chrysostome's sermons, and books on freemasonry and pneumatology. Besides contributing to perspective drawing, he wrote the first geological study in Dutch. His History of the Fatherland appeared posthumously in thirteen volumes. He himself regarded his linguistic studies and literary essays as his main achievement. Bilderdijk filled thousands of pages with his idiosyncratic views on the gender of nouns, the alphabet, grammar, spelling, medieval manuscripts, tragedy, and drama in general.Not surprisingly, Bilderdijk's varied interests and comprehensive mind have led to different interpretations of his thought. Most are one of two kinds. Writers subscribing to the first interpretation regard him as a somewhat strange but devout apologist for Calvinist orthodoxy. They stress the fact that Bilderdijk was the only intellectual who, in the midst of the soul-destroying rationalism propounded by a complacent liberal establishment, dared to cry out against Revolution and Enlightenment, thus revivifying the religious heart of the nation. 3 Those who follow the second interpretation emphasize the Romantic nature of his thought. This group tends to look upon Bilderdijk as the only true Dutch Romantic, a Wordsworth and Coleridge combined, a metaphysical if rather erratic genius who outgrew the intellectual marshlands of his native country. Writers in this tradition stress his definition of poetry as a spontaneous overflow of feeling, his linguistic achievements, his preoccupation with geology, and his visionary view of Dutch history. 4 One major interpreter, commenting on Bilderdijk's "real position as a philosopher," has stated that "to me there can be no doubt that Bilderdijk should be placed among the post-Kantian idealists like Fichte and Schelling (cf., again, Coleridge!)." 5Such statements are largely products of wishful thinking. Bilderdijk was not a devout Calvinist. He hardly ever went to church, his theology exhibits suspiciously heterodox leanings, and his professed adherence to the doctrine of predestination had less to do with a profound knowledge of the articles of Dort than mystical resignation. Similarly, the depiction of Bilderdijk as a post-Kantian idealist is sympathetic but lacks any evidence. Some literary historians have [End Page 314] tried to salvage the "Romantic" nature of his poetry, but the result is not particularly convincing. 6"And who is Bilderdijk," to echo Southey, if he was neither a Calvinist nor a Romantic? How should one interpret his thought? What should one do... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:American Philosophy: The Basics by Nancy StanlickPeter [email protected] Stanlick. American Philosophy: The Basics. London: Routledge, 2013. 174 pp with index.In 174 pages American Philosophy: The Basics covers the American philosophical tradition from its European roots to some of its contemporary leanings. The stated goal of the book is to give an overview of American philosophy and “explain what makes American philosophy a national or cultural philosophical tradition.” This (...) is a particularly tall order for such a short book, and it might be understandable if Stan-lick necessarily omits numerous thinkers from the canon. Overall, the book succeeds at giving a quick overview of the history of American philosophy.The text covers a fairly diverse selection of philosophers. Starting from Jonathan Edwards’ Calvinist theology, the book moves through early American social and political thought, and the European enlightenment ideals that underwrite them, as found in revolutionary era thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin [End Page 578] Franklin. The rest of the chapters quickly address New England transcendentalism and classical pragmatism. The book ends with two quick summaries of “recent” developments in American philosophy split between metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of science; and a second section on social, political, and ethical writings. The latter section includes summaries of recent writings on feminist ethics and African American social thought. Although these themes are particularly welcome, the book would have benefited by addressing feminist and African American contributions not just to ethics or social thought, but also to debates in epistemology or the philosophy of science.The author’s intended audience is undergraduates taking an American philosophy course or those wholly uninformed about the American philosophical tradition. Although the book serves as a helpful summary of various views in the American intellectual tradition, it would need to be supplemented by a substantial amount of primary texts to provide enough course material for a semester. The text does not contain enough critical commentary to function as a secondary resource by itself, but could function alongside additional secondary material.This last point is particularly telling about the book’s goals. Stanlick manages to introduce and explain numerous classic philosophical problems throughout the text (e.g., the mind-body problem, the problem of freewill, arguments for God’s existence, etc…) and provides a glossary at the end of the book, but does not do much to explore any of the issues in-depth. In part this is because of the overview nature of the text, but additional explanations, as well as a longer list of secondary sources, would have gone a long way in strengthening the author’s overall approach. This is an interesting, and I think helpful, approach for a lower-level philosophy text: it provides clear exposition of philosophical terminology while never straying from the overall goal of exploring the American philosophical tradition.One initial problem is the author’s narrative commitment to what makes American philosophy uniquely American. Stanlick argues that what is indicative of American philosophy is more of an emphasis on “what we can do with theories, principles, and arguments” than with theoretical or abstract problems. While we may be able to see this emphasis in some of the classical pragmatists and early American intellectuals, I think it’s difficult to claim that such an emphasis is indicative of all American philosophy.Additionally, seemingly major American philosophers are simply absent. Though discussions of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty compose the pragmatism chapter, no mention is made of C.I. Lewis or Sidney Hook. Recent pragmatists, outside of W.V.O Quine and Rorty, are missing from both the pragmatism chapter and later chapters on contemporary developments in American philosophy. It seems reasonable to expect some mention of [End Page 579] Robert Brandom’s analytic pragmatism, the contemporary revival of Peirce’s philosophy, Cheryl Misak’s extensive work on American pragmatism (although one of her edited volumes is mentioned in a “further readings” sections), Susan Haack’s epistemology, or Richard Shusterman’s work on embodiment and pragmatism. Although not American in genesis, 19th Hegelianism (as especially seen in the St. Louis and Ohio Hegelians) does not appear... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Introduction to the Mystery of the Church by Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P.David OlsonIntroduction to the Mystery of the Church. By Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P. Trans. by Michael J. Miller. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Pp. xxviii + 640. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8132-2607-1.La Soujeole intends his work to be a textbook in an introductory course in ecclesiology. While this is a review of (...) the English translation, the book was first published in French in 2007, and the preface to the original edition stated, “The present volume is a course in ecclesiology that has been taught regularly at the Dominican House of Studies in Toulouse” (xxv). As a textbook, it is well structured and should be accessible to a wide variety of students. The writing style in translation is clear and straightforward, with explanations given for any terms of art which are used, making it accessible to an audience with some theological training.The tone of the book is theological, that is to say, it is focused on an ordered view of the Catholic faith. It is not apologetic or polemical as is sometimes the case with books on ecclesiology, particularly those preceding the Second Vatican Council. On the other hand, it is certainly not a relativistic, blandly Christian study of various notions of church. Each of the topics within the book is situated within Scripture, and the author provides ample bibliography, though—not surprisingly, considering his religious order and background—the work leans heavily upon St. Thomas Aquinas. The book gives a very balanced view of the teachings of Vatican II.The author begins his work with a general introduction that provides a brief historical overview of important moments and trends in the theology of the Church, as well as a review of ecclesiology as a separate theological subject. One point is that the study of ecclesiology per se is relatively new, beginning only in the fourteenth century, but that questions concerning the ecclesia are found within all major areas of theological study. Ecclesiology cannot neatly be divorced from the study of the doctrine of God, Christology, or the sacraments. Issues regarding sacramental theology and Christology are prominent in the second portion of the book.Explanations are full and show a certain rigor. Some might consider them at times pedantic. For example, the distinction of belief in God from belief in the Church in the Nicene Creed is more than four pages in length, rehearsing difficulties of translation (296-301). More substantially on this point, over these four plus pages the author does not manage to make what would be to many theologians the obvious distinction between the absolute God and the created reality referred to as the Church. In fact, it is not clear that this is a distinction the author would want to make, as the second part of the book, containing his speculative theology, eschews a distinction between a visible and invisible church, the body of the Church and the grace of Jesus Christ. A [End Page 324] too-cursory reading of the second part could tend toward conflating the Church and the inner life of God.The book is divided into three parts. The first part is subdivided into thematic descriptions of the Church. The several themes explored are “Images of the Church and the Kingdom of God,” “the Church [as] the Body of Christ,” “the Church [as] the Temple of the Spirit,” and “the Church [as] the People of God.” The discussion on the Kingdom of God is the most limited. The first part of the book concludes with a section entitled “Recapitulation: The Church Is a Mystery.”The presentations on the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Spirit, and the People of God are done thoroughly. They follow a standard pattern of reviewing Scripture, patristic developments, the medieval period (mostly St. Thomas), and developments from Vatican II, which the author characterizes as the council on the Church. Following a thematic approach, particularly in teaching ecclesiology, seems most appropriate since the typical student may lack the needed... (shrink)

In the face of longstanding philosophical debates on the nature of hatred and an ever-growing interest in the underlying social-psychological function of group-directed or genocidal hatred, the peculiar affective intentionality of hatred is still very little understood. By drawing on resources from classical phenomenology, recent social-scientific research and analytic philosophy of emotions, I shall argue that the affective intentionality of hatred is distinctive in three interrelated ways: it has an overgeneralizing, indeterminate affective focus, which typically leads to a form of (...) collectivization of the target; short of a determinate affective focus, haters derive the indeed extreme affective powers of the attitude not in reaction to any specific features or actions of the targets or from some phenomenological properties of the attitude but, rather, from the commitment to the attitude itself; finally, in sharing this commitment to hate with others, hatred involves a certain negative social dialectics, robustly reinforces itself and becomes entrenched as a shared habitus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ecumenical Relational Ontology in Dialogue with ThomismGiulio MasperoIntroduction: Challenged by a FrescoEntering the Chapel of San Brice in the right transept of the Orvieto Cathedral, a city where Thomas lived for three years, one can admire a fresco by Luca Signorelli, painted in 1500, whose subject is the doctorum sapiens ordo. Here it is possible to recognize Aquinas surrounded by a group of fourteen doctors of the Church, (...) the first row of which are St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory the Great, and St. Augustine. The bishop of Hippo is symbolically conversing with the sixth-century Pope in front of a book he is holding open, and Thomas, behind them, with his right hand raised, is leaning over Augustine. The obvious connection between the two great thinkers is thus visually highlighted. This contribution aims to stress another dimension of Aquinas's thought, starting with a reading of Thomas Joseph White's impressive volume on the Trinity.1If one were to attempt the desperate feat of encapsulating the content of this book in a few keywords, the subtitle would naturally offer the three terms "nature," "mystery," and "unity." From this perspective, the text is classic and aims to highlight certain elements that unfortunately risk remaining in the shadows in contemporary Trinitarian theology. At the same time, the analysis of the narrative proposed by the author immediately shows [End Page 509] that the intention of this reconstruction of Aquinas's Trinitarian thought is explicitly relational. In fact, absolutely non-trivial elements emerge from the historical reconstruction of his sources, such as the ontological reshaping of relation by the Cappadocians before Augustine.2 Particularly valuable is the defense of the psychological analogy, often overshadowed in the social Trinitarianism prevalent today.3 Even on the critical front, the distance from process theologies and the Rahner-inspired economic Trinity is evident and interesting in White's book.The reference to relational ontology before Augustine together with the discussion of psychological analogy suggest an approach to the volume from the perspective of Trinitarian ontology. These elements, moreover, appear particularly important from an ecumenical point of view. Hence, the proposed reading of the volume presented here will start from the absolute ontological novelty introduced both by the Cappadocians and Augustine, who, from two different perspectives, held that in divinis relationships are not accidental. We wonder here: to whom is Aquinas closer? What is the meaning of this question for ecumenism?To answer such questions, this contribution will be articulated around three dogmatic cores: (1) relation in divinis; (2) the Holy Spirit; (3) how the transition from the triune God to creation is elaborated. These three elements could be recognized behind in the following quote from White's book:Creatures resemble the Trinity, then, in a threefold way. They bear the ontological insignia of the Father insofar as each one of them is substantial and enduring. However they also refer back to him as each originates from another, and is given being. Their derived existence is itself a testimony to the gift of being, which stems ultimately from the divine paternity. Insofar as creatures are intelligible, they bear the imprint of the generated Word, through whom God made all things, and who is the source of order and intelligibility in creation. Insofar as they are good in themselves and tend toward perfection, they resemble the goodness of the Spirit, the Love in whom God has made all that is good. Human beings, who are made in the image of God, resemble the Trinity in a particularly privileged way, as persons, with immaterial faculties of intellect and will. They are able to image [End Page 510] the Trinity both individually and collectively, by spiritual communion in truth and in love.4The text describes very clearly the program of a Trinitarian ontology, without departing, however, from the spirit of Thomas. The questions that will guide this contribution would like to make possible a real dialogue with the Thomist tradition on this point, so as to foster that relational dimension that seems to structure White's synthesis itself. It is to be hoped that this will also help the ecumenical enterprise, which the postmodern crisis makes... (shrink)

Codes of ethics are directly aimed at behavioral control, but they also affect a company’s ethical culture, which in turn concerns compliance and ethical behavior. To positively influence a company’s ethical culture, employees must be familiar with its code of ethics, perceive that top management is committed to the code, and believe that their peers also comply with the code. The evidence on whether a code’s design affects a company’s ethical culture is limited. This study’s factorial survey experiment contributes to (...) this gap in two ways: first, it investigates whether a code’s design affects how easily the code can be learned and, therefore, contributes to code familiarity. Second, it examines how a code can convey expectations regarding top management’s commitment and peers’ behavior, both of which are part of ethical culture. The results indicate that a positive tone increases code familiarity, and a code signed by top managers sends a strong signal of their commitment to the code. Finally, various implications of the results for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

When do people say that they are moved, and does this experience constitute a unique emotion? We review theory and empirical research on being moved across psychology and philosophy. We examine feeling labels, elicitors, valence, bodily sensations, and motivations. We find that the English lexeme being moved typically (but not always) refers to a distinct and potent emotion that results in social bonding; often includes tears, piloerection, chills, or a warm feeling in the chest; and is often described as pleasurable, (...) though sometimes as a mixed emotion. While we conclude that it is a distinct emotion, we also recommend studying it in a more comprehensive emotion framework, instead of using the ambiguous vernacular term being moved as a scientific term. (shrink)

This article develops a social epistemological analysis of Web-based search engines, addressing the following questions. First, what epistemic functions do search engines perform? Second, what dimensions of assessment are appropriate for the epistemic evaluation of search engines? Third, how well do current search engines perform on these? The article explains why they fulfil the role of a surrogate expert, and proposes three ways of assessing their utility as an epistemic tool—timeliness, authority prioritisation, and objectivity. “Personalisation” is a current trend in (...) Internet-delivered services, and consists in tailoring online content to the interests of the individual user. It is argued here that personalisation threatens the objectivity of search results. Objectivity is a public good; so there is a prima facie case for government regulation of search engines. (shrink)

Kant speaks repeatedly about the relations between ends or aims and scientific research, but the topic has mostly been ignored. What is the role of ends, especially (though not exclusively) practical ones, in his views on science? I will show that while Kant leaves ample space for recognizing a function of ends both in the definition and the pursuit of inquiry, and in the further practical application of scientific cognition, he does not claim that science is simply an instrument for (...) achieving practical ends. I explain his complex conception, pointing out that Kant argues (1) that the sciences require ends for their very definition, (2) that ends come in fundamentally different kinds, (3) that the relation between science and ends requires the rational determination and hierarchization of all our ends, with “wisdom” as the highest, and (4) that this determination and hierarchization – which ought to be done by metaphysics – has itself to be carried out in a “scientific way”. I show further that (5) Kant gives sui generis weight to the epistemic aims and standards of science and to the autonomy of science from our practical lives. This places his position between separatism and anti-separatism with regard to the relation between science and our ends or values. (shrink)

To get an initial grip of what is and, in particular, what is not at stake in the Phenomenology of SE, it is helpful to distinguish four dimensions of the sociality of emotions. As we shall see, the Phenomenology of emotions, in the sense in which I will [aut]Walther, Gerda’s account, is primarily, though certainly not exclusively, concerned with the fourth dimension. Roughly, the three first layers or levels in which social relations and facts come into play in the affective (...) life of individuals and groups are i) the interpersonal, ii) the Group and intergroup, and iii) the sociological and sociocultural dimensions. Whereas most phenomenologists, and [aut]Walther, Gerda, touch upon the interpersonal and Group-level dimensions and analyzing various collective and GroupPhenomena), the intergroup and sociological and sociocultural levels have been mined extensively by sociologists, as well as cross-cultural and social psychologists. Here is how the social [aut]Parkinson, Brian, [aut]Fischer, Agneta[aut]Manstead, Antony S. R. concisely delineate these dimensions. (shrink)

There is a close conceptual relation between the notions of religious disenchantment and scientific naturalism. One way of resisting philosophical and cultural implications of the scientific image and the subsequent process of disenchantment can be found in attempts at sketching a reenchanted worldview. The main issue of accounts of reenchantment can be a rejection of scientific results in a way that flies in the face of good reason. Opposed to such reenchantment is scientific naturalism which implies an entirely disenchanted worldview. (...) However, one of the main problems of scientific naturalism are placement problems. A reenchanted worldview does have the conceptual resources to avoid placement problems, yet seems to throw out the baby with the bathwater. A dilemma results: the Scylla of an undesirable scientific naturalism and the Charybdis of a rampant, seemingly prescientific reenchanted worldview. In this article I argue that there is a safe middle passage between these two options, i.e. the recently proposed liberal naturalism which allows for a moderate normative reenchantment. Liberal naturalism lets us have it both ways: avoiding the placement problems while retaining a necessary and reasonable adherence to science, thereby avoiding both an all-too restrictive scientific naturalism. (shrink)

Lookism refers to discrimination based on physical attractiveness or the lack thereof. A whole host of empirical research suggests that lookism is a pervasive and systematic form of social discrimination. Yet, apart from some attention in ethics and political philosophy, lookism has been almost wholly overlooked in philosophy in general and epistemology in particular. This is particularly salient when compared to other forms of discrimination based on race or gender which have been at the forefront of epistemic injustice as a (...) topic of research. This paper argues that lookism is associated with various forms of epistemic injustice. In the specific case of lookism, hermeneutic injustice takes the shape of the taboo of acknowledging that unattractive people are unattractive. This, on the one hand, results in a hampered understanding of one’s own situation insofar as one is deterred from seeing one’s looks as one major factor for one’s social position. On the other hand, this hermeneutic injustice serves as the backdrop of instances of a special kind testimonial injustice in which the ugly person’s burgeoning realization that their looks influence their social standing detrimentally is discounted due to the pejorative nature of ascribing someone the property of being unattractive or ugly. (shrink)

The purported fact that geometric theories formulated in terms of points and geometric theories formulated in terms of lines are “equally correct” is often invoked in arguments for conceptual relativity, in particular by Putnam and Goodman. We discuss a few notions of equivalence between first-order theories, and we then demonstrate a precise sense in which this purported fact is true. We argue, however, that this fact does not undermine metaphysical realism.