In this essay I argue that sports at their best qualify as final ends, that is, as ends whose value is such that they ground not only the practices whose ends they are, but everything else we do as human agents. The argument I provide to support my thesis is derived from Harry Frankfurt's provocative work on the importance of the things we care about, more specifically, on his claim that it is by virtue of caring (...) about things and practices, really caring about them ? even loving them ? we are able to regard and treat them as final ends. Sports, I claim, are paradigmatic examples of practices cared about and loved in these deep ways, and as such deserve to be considered, rather than dismissed because of their supposed triviality, as one of those ends around which a life most worth living can be legitimately forged. (shrink)

From the perspective of an African ethic, analytically interpreted as a philosophical principle of right action, what are the proper final ends of a publicly funded university and how should they be ranked? To answer this question, I first provide a brief but inclusive review of the literature on Africanising higher education from the past 50 years, and contend that the prominent final ends suggested in it can be reduced to five major categories. Then, I spell (...) out an intuitively attractive African moral theory and apply it to these five final ends, arguing that three of them are appropriate but that two of them are not. After that, I maintain that the African moral theory prescribes two additional final ends for a public university that are not salient in the literature. Next, I argue that employing the African moral theory as I do enables one to rebut several criticisms of Africanising higher education that have recently been made from a liberal perspective. I conclude by posing questions suitable for future research. (shrink)

Henry Richardson argues that we can determine our ends rationally. He constructs a rich and original theory of how we can reason about our final goals. Richardson defuses the counter-arguments for the limits of rational deliberation, and develops interesting ideas about how his model might be extended to interpersonal deliberation of ends, taking him to the borders of political theory. Along the way Richardson offers illuminating discussions of, inter alia, Aristotle, Aquinas, Sidgwick, and Dewey, as well as (...) the work of several contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

Henry Richardson argues that we can determine our ends rationally. He constructs a rich and original theory of how we can reason about our final goals. Richardson defuses the counter-arguments for the limits of rational deliberation, and develops interesting ideas about how his model might be extended to interpersonal deliberation of ends, taking him to the borders of political theory. Along the way Richardson offers illuminating discussions of, inter alia, Aristotle, Aquinas, Sidgwick, and Dewey, as well as (...) the work of several contemporary philosophers. (shrink)

This paper provides a conception and qualitative analysis of a recent innovative pedagogical experience, a two-week program called “Understand and Change the World”, which is designed to help business schools generate an impetus towards change within students, faculty, and administrators and more generally to the institution’s systemic sustainable capability. We argue that harnessing the ends rather than the means is the key to meeting sustainability challenges within business schools. The conceptual basis of our program provides broad avenues for business (...) school pedagogy. The pedagogy relies on students’ sense of meaning and practical wisdom to raise empathy, awareness of the common good, and the fundamental relevance of such empathy and awareness for the business world. This implies taking a step back from the traditional instrumental approach to business education and, more broadly, to careers and business. (shrink)

Partial reprint of an article first appearing in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (2009).

Presents MacIntyre's most explicit defense of his approach to Thomistic metaphysics. This lecture follows MacIntyre's argument in After Virtue that modern philosophy has very literally lost its way, and the problems it faces are insoluble. The difficulties are twofold, and stem from the Cartesian turn to the self in the XVith century.

Historically, the view, prevalent in contemporary economics and decision theory as well as philosophy, that rational action consists simply in satisfying one’s desires, whatever they may be, as efficiently as possible, is to be found first in Book II of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. This view has counterintuitive and self-refuting implications, in that it recognizes as rational behavior that may reveal a clear degree of irresponsibility or psychological instability. Accordingly, many Hume scholars have tried to show recently that this (...) view was not Hume’s; and that, on the contrary, Hume did supply an account of rational final ends--in his discussion of the calm passions, the “steady and general view” that corrects the biases and contingencies of an individual’s desires and perceptions, and elsewhere. But a detailed reconstruction of Hume’s views on these matters that assembles all the relevant texts does not support this thesis. Instead, it undermines it. Hence the counterintuitive and self-refuting implications of Hume’s view of rational action must be allowed to stand. (shrink)

This paper is a non-technical paper on the kinematics of rational decision-making. lt focuses upon Williams’s Regret argument. The Argument is directed against injunction implicit in standard decision theory and formulated by Rawls: a rational agent is always ready to act so that she need never blame herself “no matter how things finally transpire”. The purpose of this paper is to offer new insights into theweaknesses of the Argument, introducing new considerations regarding coherence of the self of the would-be repentant. (...) The opaqueness of one’s future preference-structure is argued at length, stressing that standard decision theory cannot possibly allow that the decision tree is not comprehended at the time of making one’s choice, even if it is about one’s final end. (shrink)

In this article, written for the generally educated reader, I summarize my latest thinking about a dilemma that I believe current theoretical reflection faces about the proper ultimate aims of a public university. Specifically, I make the following three major points: (1) On the one hand, all dominant theories of how properly to spend public resources entail that academics should not pursue knowledge for its own sake and should rather devote their energies toward promoting some concrete public good (such as (...) citizenship, justice, autonomy or the like). (2) On the other hand, that view of the academic enterprise entails patent absurdities. (3) The dilemma is best resolved by articulating a new theory of how public resources ought to be spent, one according to which the point of the state and its public institutions ought to be to _balance_ the realization of final goods. (shrink)

Presents MacIntyre's most explicit defense of his approach to Thomistic metaphysics. This lecture follows MacIntyre's argument in After Virtue that modern philosophy has very literally lost its way, and the problems it faces are insoluble. The difficulties are twofold, and stem from the Cartesian turn to the self in the XVith century.

Terry Pinkard draws on Hegel's central works as well as his lectures on aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history in this deeply informed and original exploration of Hegel's naturalism.

In this paper I argue that excising a final end from accounts of virtue does them more harm than good. I attempt to establish that the justification of contemporary virtue ethics suffers if moved this one step too far from the resources in traditional accounts. This is because virtue, as we tend to describe it, rests on an account of practical rationality wherein the role of the final end is integral. I highlight the puzzles that are generated by (...) the ellipsis that is “the role of a final end” in contemporary theories of virtue. The authors of these theories devise ad hoc solutions for these puzzles, puzzles that do not exist for traditional final end-based accounts. Recent critics of virtue ethics have certainly not been satisfied the explanations being offer in lieu of references to a final end. As a remedy, I recommend that the role of a final end be reintroduced in contemporary virtue ethics. I hope to explain that there is nothing to be frightened of and much to be gained. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify how, as Fichte himself claims in a 1800 letter draft, the theory of intersubjectivity he presents in the 1800 Vocation of Man marks an improvement over the theory he presents in the 1798 System of Ethics. Taking my departure from Marco Ivaldo’s suggestion that Fichte ceases to rely on the “good” but still “rather dogmatic” Leibnizian hypothesis of preestablished harmony in the former work in the way that he does in the latter, I argue that (...) the difference lies in his no longer counting on the hypothesis to secure the agreement of each of our worlds and our perception of each other’s actions in it. Fichte attempts to dispense with this last vestige of dogmatism in the Vocation of Man by employing the ethical drive in its material determinateness (in other words, each of our final end) as a transcendental ground for the agreement of our worlds, and thereby the possibility of intersubjectivity. The communal conception of our final end which Fichte develops in the last part of the System of Ethics prepares it for its role as such a ground. For it is in the demand of the “voice of conscience” in us to co-operate with others to bring about “one great free moral community” that he finds in the Vocation of Man a transcendental source and basis for our conviction that the worlds of others’ perceptions agree with the world of our perception. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify how, as Fichte himself claims in a 1800 letter draft, the theory of intersubjectivity he presents in the 1800 Vocation of Man marks an improvement over the theory he presents in the 1798 System of Ethics. Taking my departure from Marco Ivaldo’s suggestion that Fichte ceases to rely on the “good” but still “rather dogmatic” Leibnizian hypothesis of preestablished harmony in the former work in the way that he does in the latter, I argue that (...) the difference lies in his no longer counting on the hypothesis to secure the agreement of each of our worlds and our perception of each other’s actions in it. Fichte attempts to dispense with this last vestige of dogmatism in the Vocation of Man by employing the ethical drive in its material determinateness (in other words, each of our final end) as a transcendental ground for the agreement of our worlds, and thereby the possibility of intersubjectivity. The communal conception of our final end which Fichte develops in the last part of the System of Ethics prepares it for its role as such a ground. For it is in the demand of the “voice of conscience” in us to co-operate with others to bring about “one great free moral community” that he finds in the Vocation of Man a transcendental source and basis for our conviction that the worlds of others’ perceptions agree with the world of our perception. (shrink)

The question of the viability of theological eudaimonism as an interpretation of the moral life has generated increasing debate in recent years. This essay aims to advance the debate about theological eudaimonism (and eudaimonism more generally) by addressing a closely related but insufficiently discussed issue: the nature of human agency and its relationship to value. The most commonly raised objection to eudaimonism is that it is objectionably agent‐oriented. I argue that worries about objectionable self‐orientation often stem from importing foreign pictures (...) of agency into the eudaimonist tradition. I make this case through an analysis of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent critique of eudaimonism. Wolterstorff presupposes a common contemporary conception of agency. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas and Elizabeth Anderson, I show that other conceptions of agency are available. Clarity about the nature of human agency and its relationship to value will bring greater clarity to the debate about eudaimonism and self‐orientation. (shrink)

Gao Yihan was among the Chinese thinkers most familiar with Western political thought. He graduated from Meiji University in Japan in 1916, returned to China and was appointed professor of political science at Beijing University in 1918, where he remained until 1926. He subsequently taught at the Law School of the China National Institute of Shanghai, served as a member of the control Yuan, and after 1949 was dean of the Law School of Nanjing University. He wrote extensively on political (...) theory, evaluating and synthesizing various trends in Western political thought. Rights figure prominently in Gao's writings; in addition to being one of the most subtle analysts of the general notion of rights writing in China, Gao was among the earliest advocates of economic rights. The first excerpt we translate here comes from one of Gao's earliest writings and articulates the central features of the conception of rights he discusses throughout his career: Rights are to be protected by the state, but they are neither innate nor ends in themselves. The second excerpt comes from a slightly later essay in which Gao makes explicit that rights, in his view, have an economic as well as a political dimension. (shrink)

I argue that Fichte’s account of pure reason and its supreme self-wrought Idea is, in its transcendental essentials, very much modeled on Kant’s. The key difference between their positions, I suggest, is simply that Fichte operates with a more abstract understanding of the transcendentally basic elements of finite rationality; consequently, he arrives at a conceptually more concentrated understanding of pure reason’s preeminent Idea. In section one, I supply some context for that comparison. In section two, I recount Fichte’s depiction of (...) “the I as an Idea” and note some importantly related concepts and claims. In section three, I examine a pair of interestingly different approaches taken by Kant to understanding and identifying the Ideas engendered by reason’s basic aims and operations. Finally, in section four, I suggest that the Jena Wissenschaftslehre reflects Fichte’s tacit appropriation of the transcendentally more fundamental of those two Kantian approaches. (shrink)

The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida’s final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign”, as the explicit themes of the seminar—namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal—come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world. The book begins with Derrida’s analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context of (...) his other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–30, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events—the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq—and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida’s corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end—just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments. (shrink)

Smallpox's devastating impact on Indigenous Peoples of the Americas figures prominently in the historical literature. But when did this horrific experience end? Historians have not noticed, and there are good reasons why they have not, at least for Indigenous Peoples of the United States. Between 1898 and 1903, federal agents and tribal officials enforced quarantines, isolated infected individuals, and vaccinated communities in response to a nation-wide epidemic. Smallpox consequently disappeared. But the evidence we can use to identify this ending leads (...) us in directions other than acknowledging a significant historical milestone. Federal agents detailed efforts to erase Indigenous cultures and described ongoing health problems not related to smallpox, making the passage of the old scourge less significant. Stories that Indigenous Peoples produced after eradication, moreover, contained no celebration of smallpox's demise. These stories instead refer to the disease's arrival as the beginning of colonial trauma that had yet to come to its own end. (shrink)

In the Middle Ages more than in other periods, eschatology informed the way people understood humankind and the world. The papers in the present volume are devoted to the complexity and interconnectivty of the eschatological orientation of the Middle Ages. Central topics are questions of the influence and formation of eschatological themes in philosophy and the significance of ideas of the final end in medieval political thought. In addition, there is a consideration of further themes from history, theology, art (...) and literature. The 29th volume of the Miscellanea Mediaevalia contains the papers delivered to the 32nd Cologne Medieval Studies Conference plus additional contributions. The volume includes five papers on the 50-year history of the Thomas Institute, which has been organising the Cologne Medieval Studies Conference for the last half century. (shrink)

La Iglesia ha dado por zanjado el caso Galileo en más de una ocasion. No obstante, la polémica ha continuado. Aquí se argumenta que las distintas iniciativas de la Iglesia respecto al caso Galileo -la revision de la condena dei copernicanismo a partir de 1820; la utilización de los documentos dei dossier inquisitorial de Galileo a partir de 1850 y la polémica suscitada; el caso Paschini (1942-1965); y las conclusiones de Juan Pablo II en 1992-1993- ponen de manifiesto la misma (...) actitud de la Iglesia y la persistencia de los intereses básicos de partida, que hacen muy improbable que el “caso de Galileo”, al margen de los problemas genuinamente históricos, pueda cerrarse.Althoght the Catholic Church has setlled “Galileo’s case” several times, the controverse goes on. I argue that Church’s initatives on this matter -the revision of the condenmation of copernicanism from 1820; the use of documents coming from Galileo’s inquisitorial dossier from 1850 on and the controversy raised by this use; Paschini case (1942-1965); and the conclusions drawn by pope John Paul II in 1992-1993- make evident the identical actitude of the Church as well as the persistence of his basic interests, which make very unlikely that Galileo’s case, regardless of genuine historical problems, call be considered as closed. (shrink)