In this acclaimed exploration of the search for "authentic" individual identity, Marshall Berman explores the historical experiences and needs out of which this new radicalism arose. Focussing on eighteenth-century Paris, a time and place in which a distinctively modern form of society was just coming into its own, Berman shows how the ideal of authenticity—of a self that could organize the individual's energy and direct it toward his own happiness—articulated eighteenth-century man's deepest responses to this brave new world, (...) and his most ardent hope for a new life in it. Exploring in particular the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, Berman shows how the ideal of authenticity was radically opposed to the bourgeois, capitalistic idea of "self-interest.". (shrink)

A world of legal conflicts -- The limits of sovereigntist territoriality -- From universalism to cosmopolitanism -- Towards a cosmopolitan pluralist jurisprudence -- Procedural mechanisms, institutional designs, and discursive practices for managing pluralism -- The changing terrain of jurisdiction -- A cosmopolitan pluralist approach to choice of law -- Recognition of judgments and the legal negotiation of difference.

What is the best way to respond to monuments in our communities if they represent people who stood for harmful ideas and/or societal structures? I start with the assumption that it would be best for everyone if all of the harmful monuments were removed from our public squares. The more interesting question is: Why would it be best? I will examine critically two different explanations as to why it would be best: one, Plato's, which rests on the harmful non-intellectual influences (...) of images and the other, Socrates’, which rests on the harmful intellectual influences of those images. In the end, I shall argue that Socrates got it right and Plato wrong due to the former's ability to explain human behaviour and the latter's surprising lack of that same ability, despite how widely it is believed. If the argument is correct, it will have deep and widespread implications for how we educate our children and ourselves about every important aspect of the human condition. (shrink)

What all contemporary so-called aristotelian realists have in common has been identified by David Armstrong as the principle of instantiation. This principle has been put forward in different versions, but all of them have the following simple consequence in common: uninstantiated universals do not exist. Such entities are for the lotus-eating Platonist to countenance, but not for any sort of moderate realist. I shall argue that this principle, in any guise, is not the best way to differentiate aristotelianism from Platonism. (...) In its place, I shall suggest that the best way to differentiate the two versions of realism from each other is by means of a far more powerful idea: naturalism. And the surprising conclusion given this means of differentiation will be that contrary to the usual proclamations, Platonism will be the more naturalistic theory, whereas aristotelianism will come to be seen for what it really is, namely, non-naturalistic. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the human perspective is not fully reducible – that is, that something would indeed be lost in the absence of the human perspective. It shows that epistemic subjectivity itself is an irreducible, ineliminable feature of the human standpoint. Subjectivity goes along with substantiality, and to be an epistemic subject is to be a substance with a mind. In E2p13, Spinoza identifies the mind's object with the body, thereby specifying where the multiplicity of epistemic subjects comes from (...) – how, that is, individual epistemic subjects are identified and differentiated. The chapter looks at how the three kinds of knowledge relate to the notions of epistemic subjectivity. These include: imaginative knowledge; reason, or knowledge from common notions; and intuitive knowledge. Imaginative knowledge works straightforwardly on the model of having ideas in the thick sense. (shrink)

Without doctors being able to explain medical decisions to patients, I argue their use of black box AIs would erode the effective and respectful care they provide patients. In addition, I argue that physicians should use AI black boxes only for patients in dire straits, or when physicians use AI as a “co-pilot” (analogous to a spellchecker) but can independently confirm its accuracy. I respond to A.J. London’s objection that physicians already prescribe some drugs without knowing why they work.

This book is a story about promoting systemic change of SEL in the mindset and capabilities of staff, in the structure of the district, and in the vision, mission, and policies that guide the district.

When people talk about religion, most soon mention the major religious traditions of our times, but then, thinking further, most mention as well the religions of Indigenous peoples and of such vanished civilizations as ancient Greece and Egypt and Persia. That is, we have come to understand that there are-and have been-many different religions; anthropologists estimate the total in the thousands. They also estimate that there have been thousands of human cultures, which is to say that the making of a (...) culture and the making of its religion go together: each religion is embedded in its cultural history. True, certain religions have attempted, and variously succeeded, in crossing cultural boundaries to "convert the heathens," but the invaded cultures usually put their unmistakable stamp on what they import, as evinced by the pulsating percussive Catholic masses sung in Africa. In the end, each of these religions addresses two fundamental human concerns: How Things Are and Which Things Matter. How Things Are is articulated as a Cosmology or Cosmos: How the natural world came to be, how humans came to be, what happens after we die, the origins of evil and tragedy and natural disaster and love. Which Things Matter becomes codified as a Morality or Ethos: the Judaic Ten Commandments, the Christian Sermon on the Mount, the Five Pillars of Islam, the Buddhist Vinaya, the Confucian Five Relations, and the understandings inherent in numerous Indigenous traditions. The role of a religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its attendant moral understandings. As a culture evolves, a distinctive Cosmos and Ethos appears in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the early humans, the stories, ceremonies and art associated with our religions-of-origin have been central to our lives. I stand in awe of these religions. I have no need to take on their contradictions or immiscibility, any more than I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipe ceremonies coexist with Japanese tea ceremonies. And indeed, the failure of Soviet Marxism to obliterate Russian Orthodoxy, and of Maoism to obliterate Buddhism, Confucianism, or Daoism, and of Christianity to obliterate Indigenous understandings, reminds us that projects designed to overthrow religious traditions face strong headwinds. (shrink)

In this book, Michael P. Berman uses Merleau-Ponty’s thought to develop a critique, grounded in his phenomenology, of certain issues in the philosophy of religion such as faith, love, vision, soul, magic and miracles, judgment, evil, and hallowing.

The Essential Berkeley and Neo-Berkeley is an introduction to the life and work of one of the most significant thinkers in the history of philosophy and a penetrating philosophical assessment of his lasting legacy. David Berman goes beyond providing an introduction and gives us a broader and deeper appreciation of Berkeley as a philosopher. He argues for Berkeley's work as a philosophical system with coherence and important key themes hitherto unexplored and provides an analysis of why he thinks Berkeley's (...) work has had such lasting significance. With a particular focus on Berkeley's dualist thinking and theories of 'mental types', Berman provides the reader with a key to unlocking the significance of this work. This introductory text will provide an insight into Berkeley's full body of work, the distinctiveness of his thinking and how deeply relevant this key thinker is to contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Set aside fanciful doomsday speculations about AI. Even lower-level AIs, while otherwise friendly and providing us a universal basic income, would be able to do all our jobs. Also, we would over-rely upon AI assistants even in our personal lives. Thus, John Danaher argues that a human crisis of moral passivity would result However, I argue firstly that if AIs are posited to lack the potential to become unfriendly, they may not be intelligent enough to replace us in all our (...) jobs. If instead they are intelligent enough to replace us, the risk they become unfriendly increases, given that they would not need us and humans would just compete for valuable resources. Their hostility will not promote our moral passivity. Secondly, the use of AI assistants in our personal lives will become a problem only if we rely on them for almost all our decision-making and motivation. But such a (maximally) pervasive level of dependence raises the question of whether humans would accept it, and consequently whether the crisis of passivity will arise. (shrink)

Global legal pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the twenty-first century.

This volume explores the concepts of reference and identity in public discourses. Its contributions study discourse-specific reference and labelling patterns, both from a historical and present-day perspective, and discuss their impact on self- and other-representation in the construction of identity. They combine multiple methodological approaches, including corpus-based quantitative as well as qualitative approaches, and apply them to a range of text types that are or were (intended to be) public, such as letters, newspapers, parliamentary debates, and online communication in the (...) form of reader comments, discussion pages and tweets. In addition to English, the languages studied include Polish as well as European and Latin American Spanish. The volume is aimed at researchers from different research paradigms in linguistics and related disciplines, such as media communication or the social and cultural sciences, who are interested in the interplay of reference and identity. (shrink)

High profile (and controversial) events and installations, like the Helter-Skelter in Norwich and the Crazy Golf Bridges in Rochester, have drawn attention to innovation and public engagement within Anglican cathedrals. The present study contextualised these innovations both empirically and conceptually. The empirical framework draws on cathedral websites to chronicle the wide and diverse range of events and installations hosted by Anglican cathedrals in England and the Isle of Man between 2018 and 2022. The conceptual framework draws on Edward Bailey’s theory (...) of implicit religion to classify and to explore these events and installations. Two insights from the theory of implicit religion emerged as of particular significance. First, the notion of implicit religion softens the boundaries between the sacred and the secular. This was exemplified by eight categories of events: scientific exhibitions, festivals, musical events, art exhibitions, theatre, markets, community events and installations. Second, the notion of implicit religion draws attention to the themes and activities that generate meaning and purpose. This was exemplified by seven themes: social justice and social conscience, violence and reconciliation, remembrance, migration and sanctuary, COVID-19 and lockdowns, personal well-being and nature and environment.Contribution: Situated within the science of cathedral studies, this article identifies the range of innovative events and installations hosted by Anglican Cathedrals in England and the Isle of Man and assesses the significance of these events and installations through Edward Bailey’s lens of implicit religion, discussing first the softening of boundaries between the sacred and the secular and then the generation of meaning and purpose through the core themes raised by these events and installations. (shrink)

Spricht man über die Aufklärung, taucht man, wie meist in der Philosophie in eine Männerwelt, Frauen sind darin Randfiguren. In einer Zeit, als die Männer die Grundlagen der modernen Zivilisation legten, hat man Frauen eine Nebenrolle zugewiesen. Trotzdem haben Aufklärerinnen durch ihr Denken, ihr Werk und ihr Beispiel viele weitere Generationen beeinflusst. Der Titel Aufklärerinnen beschreibt Philosophinnen, Literatinnen und Wissenschaftlerinnen, die in dieser Umbruchphase etwas bewegen wollten. Mangelnder Frauenbildung, wirtschaftlicher Abhängigkeit und ehelicher Unterwerfung hatten sie den Kampf angesagt. Und das (...) in einer Zeit, die den Frauen mehr denn je ein bürgerliches Korsett aufgezwungen hat. When one speaks about the Enlightenment, one is immersed, as is usually the case in philosophy, in a man's world; women are marginal figures in it. At a time when men were laying the foundations of modern civilisation, women were assigned a supporting role. Nevertheless, women Enlightenment thinkers have influenced many more generations through their thinking, their work and their example. The title Women Enlighteners describes female philosophers, writers and scientists who wanted to make a difference during this period of upheaval. They declared war on the lack of female education, economic dependence and marital subjugation. And they did so in a time that imposed a bourgeois corset on women more than ever before. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 4, Page 520-530, July 2022.

Unter dem Titel Feuerbach und der Judaismus wird mit dieser Publikation ein neues Kapitel in der Feuerbachforschung aufgeschlagen, da erstmalig Feuerbachs Stellung zum Judaismus, aber auch sein Einfluß auf die deutsch-jüdische Philosophie ...

Andrew Simester’s new book, Fundamentals of Criminal Law: Responsibility, Culpability, and Wrongdoing, is a masterful analysis of the doctrines of the general part of the criminal law and the multiple, overlapping functions that those doctrines serve. Along the way, Simester makes explicit what criminal law theorists routinely presuppose—that the ordinary words “blameworthiness” and “culpability” pick out the same moral concept. This essay argues that this assumed equivalence is mistaken: two concepts are in play, not one. Roughly, to be blameworthy is (...) to be justly liable to blaming practices in virtue of being at fault, and to be culpable is to act in a fashion that manifests or issues from insufficient concern for morally weighty interests. Culpability is not identical to blameworthiness, but rather a ground of blameworthiness: to be culpable is one way to be at fault, thus one way to be blameworthy. More importantly, culpability is not the exclusive ground of blameworthiness; an agent can be at fault, hence blameworthy, without being culpable. This essay defends these conceptual claims and draws forth some implications for two theses that Simester advances: that it is morally permissible to punish persons for criminal negligence and that it is unjust to punish persons who don’t deserve it. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its neural correlates during sleep. However, the precise differences between lucid and non-lucid dreams remain poorly understood. The construction of the Lucidity and Consciousness in (...) Dreams scale was based on theoretical considerations and empirical observations. Exploratory factor analysis of the data from the first survey identified eight factors that were validated in a second survey using confirmatory factor analysis: INSIGHT, CONTROL, THOUGHT, REALISM, MEMORY, DISSOCIATION, NEGATIVE EMOTION, and POSITIVE EMOTION. While all factors are involved in dream consciousness, realism and negative emotion do not differentiate between lucid and non-lucid dreams, suggesting that lucid insight is separable from both bizarreness in dreams and a change in the subjectively experienced realism of the dream. (shrink)

When I raise my arm, what makes it the case that my arm's going up is an instance of my raising my arm? In this paper, I discuss Aristotle's answer to this question. His view, I argue, is that my arm's going up counts as my raising my arm just in case it is an exercise of a certain kind of causal power of mine. I show that this view differs in an interesting way both from the Davidsonian ‘standard causal (...) account’ of action and from accounts put forward by recent critics of Davidson, such as Hornsby, Alvarez and Hyman. (shrink)

Robert Adams defends a platonic account of goodness, understood as excellence, claiming that there exists a platonic good that all other good things must resemble, identifying the Good with God. Mark Murphy agrees, but argues that this platonic account is in need of Aristotelian supplementation, as resemblance must take into account a thing’s kind-membership. While this article will accept something like Murphy’s account of goodness, it will further develop its details and support. Without relying on theistic premises, I show that (...) the metaphysical status of an individual’s goodness consists in resemblance with the platonic good. As for the distinct question of what that goodness holds in virtue of, I conclude it holds in virtue of exactly: the thing’s own properties, those properties being such as to satisfy its kind-based standards, and those K-standards resembling the platonic good. I then develop an account of how K-standards resemble the platonic good: The K-standards resemble it firstly with respect to requiring activities, as the platonic good will be posited to be active, and must resemble it secondly also at the level of what teleology those activities are directed towards. I also motivate the need for a third respect of resemblance, to be developed in future work. The article ends with a discussion of the nature of the platonic good. (shrink)

Aristotelian theory, as found in Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot, claims that to be good is to be good as a member of that kind. Moreover, Foot argues in effect that goodness admits of only the kind-based sort, obtaining solely in virtue of something’s satisfying kind-based standards. However, I contend that something can satisfy kind-relative standards but nonetheless be bad—I propose a hypothetical Ebola-like microbe that meets its kind-standards of being destructive for its own sake, but it would plausibly be (...) bad for doing so. In defending my counterexample, I respond to the Aristotelian contention that evaluations should only be made from “within” the standpoint of a particular lifeform conception, rather than an “external” one from which that kind itself can be judged to be bad. (shrink)

What is the relation between time and change? Does time depend on the mind? Is the present always the same or is it always different? Aristotle tackles these questions in the Physics. In the first book in English exclusively devoted to this discussion, Ursula Coope argues that Aristotle sees time as a universal order within which all changes are related to each other. This interpretation enables her to explain two striking Aristotelian claims: that the now is like a moving (...) thing, and that time depends for its existence on the mind. (shrink)