Visual representation of instruments and musical practice has long been integral to the study of the iconology and archaeology of early music. Critical to any assessment of such evidence is an understanding of the authority of the artist, and his/her knowledge and degree of participation in musical culture. Contemporary sources reveal that music played a variety of roles in the lives and public perception of the Renaissance artists. Its most tangible manifestation was that of the artist-musician, of whom Leonardo da (...) Vinci is one of the best-known examples. An association with courtliness was one of several markers of status conferred by musical practice. This chapter investigates the domestic setting of the artist, whether in a courtly environment or in a republic, to develop themes of the social elevation of the artist, entertainment and performance, as well as creativity. (shrink)

Responding to mounting public concern about the shift to managed care, legislation to grant patient protections has dominated the health policy agenda over the past two years. Although some policies, such as laws on maternity length of stay, can be easily dismissed as “body part by body part” micromanagement of medical practice, other initiatives offer substantive, new rights to patients across the spectrum of care. At both the state and the federal levels, the right of enrollees to appeal a denial (...) of treatment or to file grievances about other plan decisions has emerged as a centerpiece of patient protection legislation. Grievance and appeal rights have been embraced as a way to empower patients, to enhance access to treatment, and to improve the quality of care by providing an external mechanism to review treatment denials. (shrink)

This engaging volume explores and defends the claim that misanthropy is a justified attitude towards humankind in the light of how human beings both compare with and treat animals. Reflection on differences between humans and animals helps to confirm the misanthropic verdict, while reflection on the moral and other failings manifest in our treatment of animals illuminates what is wrong with this treatment. Human failings, it is argued, are too entrenched to permit optimism about the future of animals, but ways (...) are proposed in which individual people may accommodate to the truth of misanthropy through cultivating mindful, humble and compassionate relationships to animals. Drawing on both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions David E. Cooper offers an original and challenging approach to the complex field of animal ethics. (shrink)

Recently, debate about the distribution of scarce organs for transplantation has focused on whether patients should have the right to place themselves on waiting lists at several transplant centers, thereby gaining an advantage over other potential recipients. This article explores the social and ethical issues raised by multiple listing, contrasting policies adopted at the national level with those implemented in New York State. It concludes by examining the implications of the debate for broader questions about entitlement and access to health (...) care. (shrink)

Philosophers constantly discuss Responsibility. Yet in every discussion of which I am aware, a rather obvious point is ignored. The obvious point is that responsibility is ascribed to collectives, as well as to individual persons. Blaming attitudes are held towards collectives as well as towards individuals. Responsibility is often ascribed to nations, towns, clubs, groups, teams, and married couples. ‘Germany was responsible for the Second World War’; ‘The club as a whole is to blame for being relegated’. Such statements are (...) not rare. (shrink)

Characterizations of philosophy abound. It is ‘the queen of the sciences’, a grand and sweeping metaphysical endeavour; or, less regally, it is a sort of deep anthropology or ‘descriptive metaphysics’, uncovering the general presuppositions or conceptual schemes that lurk beneath our words and thoughts. A different set of images portray philosophy as a type of therapy, or as a spiritual exercise, a way of life to be followed, or even as a special branch of poetry or politics. Then there is (...) a group of characterizations that include philosophy as linguistic analysis, as phenomenological description, as conceptual geography, or as genealogy in the sense proposed by Nietzsche and later taken up by Foucault. (shrink)

David E. Cooper; I*—The Presidential Address: Analytical and Continental Philosophy, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, P.

From computerized medical records to databases of pharmacological interactions and automated provisional EKG readings, the emergence of information technology has significantly altered the practice of medicine. Information technology has been widely used to enhance diagnosis and treatment and to improve communication between providers. The advent of the Internet also brings far-reaching implications for patient–physician communication, challenging physicians, patients, and policymakers to consider its impact on the delivery of medical care and the therapeutic relationship. A new set of practices by patients (...) and physicians is unfolding in cyberspace, ranging from the use of e-mail to communicate between physicians and patients in an existing relationship to one-to-one consultations with an anonymous physician and ongoing online treatment, such as psychotherapy. These practices are emerging in both the for-profit and not-for-profit spheres. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophical writings on personal identity have taken the form of attempts to discover the dominant criterion for deciding when a person at one time is identical with a person at some other time. Among the candidates for the role of dominant criterion have been bodily continuity and memory . In the normal case, where a person P is identical with a person P′ at an earlier time, it is true that P and P′ share a continuous body, that P (...) can remember experiences of P′, and that many other relationships hold between P and P′. Consequently, the debate as to which of the normal criteria is the dominant one has usually taken the form of imagining strange cases in which one or more of the normal criteria are lacking, and attempting to say, in such cases, who is identical with who. The scene was set, at least for modern times, by Locke's prince/pauper example, in which, according to Locke, the ability to remember experiences of a person having a different body guarantees, nevertheless, that one is that person—and hence that the memory criterion is dominant over the bodily identity one. (shrink)

Educational policy and discussion, in Britain and the USA, are increasingly dominated by the confused ideology of egalitarianism. David E. Cooper begins by identifying the principles hidden among the confusions, and argues that these necessarily conflict with the ideal of educational excellence - in which conflict it is this ideal that must be preserved. He goes on to criticize the use of education as a tool for promoting wider social equality, focussing especially on the muddles surrounding 'equal opportunities', 'social (...) mix' and 'reverse discrimination'. Further chapters criticize the 'new egalitarianism' favoured, on epistemological grounds, by various sociologists of knowledge in recent years and 'cultural egalitarianism' according to which standard criteria of educational value merely reflect parochial and economic interests. (shrink)

‘Reactionary modernism’ is a term happily coined by the historian and sociologist Jeffrey Herf to refer to a current of German thought during the interwar years. It indicates the attempt to ‘reconcil[e] the antimodernist, romantic and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism’ with that ‘most obvious manifestation of means–ends rationality … modern technology’. Herf's paradigm examples of this current of thought are two best-selling writers of the period: Oswald Spengler, author of the massive domesday scenario The Decline of the West (...) in 1917 and, fifteen years later, of Man and Technics, and Ernst Jünger, the now centenarian chronicler of the war in which he was a much-decorated hero, whose main theoretical work was Der Arbeiter in 1932. The label is also applied by Herf to such intellectual luminaries as the legal theorist and apologist for the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, and more contentiously Martin Heidegger. At a less elevated level, reactionary modernism also permeated the writings of countless, now forgotten engineers, who were inspired at once by the new technology, Nietzschean images of Promethean Übermenschen, and an ethos of völkisch nationalism. (shrink)

By addressing specific global problems and placing them within an ethical context, "The Environment in Question" provides the reader with both a theoretical and practical understanding of environmental issues. The contributors are internationally known figures drawn from the various disciplines which bear upon these issues, such as geography, psychology, social policy, and philosophy. The contributions range from those tackling individual concrete issues (such as nuclear waste and the threat to the rain forest) to those addressing matters of policy, principle and (...) attitude (such as our obligations to future generations and the nature of technological risk). "The Environment in Question" is designed as a text for students of philosophy, environmental science, environmental education, ecology, and teacher education. It can be used as an inter-disciplinary, self-contained course book or in conjunction with relevant material. In addition, as the essays directly and controversially address current environmental debates in a non-technical manner, it is of great interest both to professionals in those areas and to readers who care about the planet's future. The substantial cross-section of concerns and approaches will enable all readers to develop the necessary level of understanding required to initiate and sustain debate on environmental issues. Contributors: Robert Allsion, David E. Cooper, Barry S. Gower, F. G. T. Holliday, C. A. Hooker, Mary Midgley, Philip Neal, Joy A. Palmer, Robert Prosser, Holmes Rolston III, Mark Sagoff, Vandana Shiva, Stephen Sterling, Rosemary J. Stevenson, Jennifer Trusted. (shrink)

This essay charts the author’s philosophical journey from schoolboy enthusiasms for Sartre, Plato, and Buddhism to the equally intercultural themes of his writings over the last few decades. It tells of his disillusion with the dominant style of philosophy in 1960s Oxford and of the liberating effect of working for three years in the USA. The author relates the revival of his interest in Existentialism and how his reading of Heidegger led to an increasing appreciation of Asian traditions of thought. (...) The essay explains why it is important for philosophers to be acquainted with non-western traditions. This importance is illustrated by the ways in which the author draws upon various world philosophies in his recent writings on, for example, mystery, our relationship to nature, and the significance of beauty. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, aestheticians and art theorists declared the 'death' of beauty as a serious, meaningful concept for aesthetics and art practice. Such declarations are better understood as polemical provocations, making their obituarism premature. Careful attention to the writings of those cited testify to the persistence of beauty, albeit in new, 'difficult', 'challenging' forms. Beauty persists, taking on new forms and inflections.

Buddhism, one increasingly hears, is an 'eco-friendly' religion. It is often said that this is because it promotes an 'ecological' view of things, one stressing the essential unity of human beings and the natural world. Buddhism, Virtue and Environment presents a different view. While agreeing that Buddhism is, in many important respects, in tune with environmental concerns, Cooper and James argue that what makes it 'green' is its view of human life. The true connection between the religion and environmental (...) thought is to be found in Buddhist accounts of the virtues - those traits, such as compassion, equanimity and humility, that characterise the life of a spiritually enlightened individual. Central chapters of this book examine these virtues and their implications for environmental attitudes and practice. Buddhism, Virtue and Environment will be of interest not only to students and teachers of Buddhism and environmental ethics, but to those more generally engaged with moral philosophy. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book presents an original conception of Buddhist environmental thought. The authors also contribute to the wider debate on the place of ethics in Buddhist teachings and practices, and to debates within 'virtue ethics' on the relations between human well-being and environmental concern. (shrink)

This paper defends the description of Buddhism—by Schopenhauer and many other nineteenth-century figures—as pessimistic. Pessimism, in the relevant sense, is a dark, negative judgment on the psychological, social, and moral condition of humankind and the prospects for its amelioration. After discussing texts in the Pali canon that provide prima facie support for the charge of pessimism, two familiar responses are considered. One emphasizes the positive aspects of the human condition recognized by the Buddha; the other emphasizes the prospect held out (...) by him for the cessation of dukkha. It is argued that neither response is persuasive—not least because of a failure to appreciate the gulf between ordinary “worldling” existence and that of the arahant or enlightened person. A final section discusses the description of the arahant as “transcending the world” and the human condition. If correct, this supports the charge of pessimism. This is because pessimism is a claim about the human condition, about our being-in-the-world, and cannot therefore be refuted by the prospect of a mode of being that transcends this condition. (shrink)

In my 1993 IJPS paper it was suggested that postmodernist verdicts on ‘the death of philosophy’ relied on a rejection of any ‘substantive’ or ‘metaphysical’ notion of truth. The present paper relates these verdicts to Wittgenstein’s alleged ‘philosophical quietism’. In both cases, for example, there is a rejection of ‘depth’. Various characterisations of Wittgenstein’s position are questioned, including the idea that his quietism consists in showing the impossibility of sceptical challenges to our ‘hinge’ propositions and beliefs. It is then argued, (...) however, that recognition of the groundlessness of beliefs (and practices), far from curing ‘vertigo’ or ‘Angst’, is apt to inspire it. In a final section, I propose that the ‘metaphysical horror’ at the impossibility of articulating grounds for our beliefs can be allayed only by the thought that these answer to a reality that cannot be articulated and must therefore remain a mystery. One role for philosophy might be to cultivate a sense of this mystery and trace its implications for how we should live. (shrink)

We shall argue that there is adequate moral justification for capital punishment with linkage, that is, with linkage to keeping non‐murderers from dying. We present the argument with two aims in mind. The first is to question the conventional wisdom, seldom challenged even by proponents of capital punishment, that being an abolitionist is closely connected to having a civilized respect for human life. This conventional wisdom, we hope to show, is somewhat off the mark. To this end we exhibit structural (...) similarities between so‐called lifeboat dilemmas and the public's relationship to a murderer. In a lifeboat dilemma one must choose between saving this life or that, since the lifeboat will not hold both persons. Now if this life were an innocent's and that one a murderer's, a choice to save the latter would not be met with accusations of callousness towards human life. We hope to project everyone's intuitions about this case onto the more baffling case of a society's relationship to the murderers and dying innocents in its midst. (shrink)

It is by now something of a cliché of Green discourse that environmental degradation and devastation is grounded in a sharp opposition – the legacy, it is often charged, of Christian metaphysics – between the human and the non-human, between the realms of culture and nature. If one is to understand, let alone endorse, the very general environmentalist ambition to dissolve the dualism of the human and the non-human, it is by questioning rather more tractable and particular dichotomies, like that (...) between art and nature appreciation, where it would seem wise to begin. (shrink)

R. S. Peters has not only been the major philosopher of education in Britain during second half of the twentieth century, but by common consent, he has transformed the subject and brought it into the mainstream of contemporary philosophy. The ten essays in this book attest to his influence whether by critical examination of his ideas or by original treatment of topics in which has has inspired a new interest.