Commented Article: LIU, Rong. Philosophical spirit in traditional Chinese drama. Trans/Form/Ação: Unesp journal of philosophy, Marília, v. 47, n. 4, “Eastern thought”, e0240063, 2024. Available at: https://revistas.marilia.unesp.br/index.php/transformacao/article/view/14667.

Commented article: LIU, Rong. Philosophical spirit in traditional Chinese drama. Trans/Form/Ação: Unesp journal of philosophy, Marília, v. 47, n. 4, “Eastern thought”, e0240063, 2024. Available at: https://revistas.marilia.unesp.br/index.php/transformacao/article/view/14667.

Resumen: El teatro chino tiene sus orígenes en formas primitivas de canto y danza, y desde entonces ha evolucionado hasta convertirse en una forma artística integral con una rica historia. Se considera una de las tres culturas dramáticas más antiguas, junto con la griega y la sánscrita de la India. Las distintas naciones tienen culturas diferentes con características nacionales únicas, mientras que los conceptos filosóficos personalizados desempeñan un papel destacado en la formación de la cultura. La ciencia, la literatura, el (...) arte, la educación, etc. que pertenecen a la categoría cultural están todos guiados e influenciados por pensamientos filosóficos, y el arte dramático es igual. Este artículo discute y analiza los pensamientos filosóficos que subyacen a la cultura dramática tradicional china. (shrink)

Mark Nelson claims that Russell's remarks—in his History of Western Philosophy—about Aquinas are ‘breathtakingly supercilious and unfair’ and ‘sniffy’. I argue that Nelson completely misrepresents Russell's criticisms of Aquinas. In particular, I argue that the silly epistemological doctrine which Nelson attributes to Russell plays no role at all in the criticism which Russell actually makes of Aquinas. Since—as Nelson himself concedes—there is no other reason to think that Russell commits himself to the epistemological doctrine in question, either in the passages (...) under discussion or elsewhere, I conclude that there is equal justice in the claim that it is Nelson's dismissal of Russell which is ‘unfair’ and ‘sniffy’. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell famously disparaged Thomas Aquinas as having ‘little of the true philosophic spirit’, because ‘he does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.’ Like many of Russell's pronouncements, this is breathtakingly supercilious and unfair. Still, even an enthusiastic admirer of Aquinas may worry that there is something in it, that there is something wrong with religious ‘commitments’ in philosophy. I examine Russell's objection by comparing standards of permissibility in epistemology with standards (...) of permissibility in ethics, where these issues are better understood. I conclude that the epistemic standard behind Russell's criticism is no less contentious in epistemology than, say, direct utilitarianism is in ethics. (shrink)

The article emphasizes the cultural and educational importance of H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy for the spiritual development of the Ukrainian society, especially in the direction of democracy and establishment of the worldview culture as a requirement for the culture of freedom. From the position of the included observer the author of the article describes some episodes of relationship in the scientist’s communities which can be defined as justice and solidary community. On the basis of the Heidegerian scheme, some dangers (...) are analyzed as demands addressed to philosophical thinking. This scheme is used by structuring of the article. The metaphoric of these dangers indicates the contextual problems which are important for producing of philosophical ideas. The experience of the Institute of Philosophy gained by solving of problems is very remarkable for the fulfillment of philosophical studies and educational practices especially by mentoring of the postgraduate students. The fact of naming the Institute after H. Skovoroda is regarded as a symbolic act with a great creative potential and energy which can be used for reviving of national traditions of philosophical thinking. The role of lyric in activating of philosophical ideas is showed. The symbiotic coexisting of the poetry, art, journalism and philosophy is one of the original features of the Skovorodian tradition caring by the well-known representatives of the Institute. All these characteristics joined with the civic culture, which was demonstrated by all generations of the Institute, allow defining it as a metaphysical place with the ability both to follow on the road of the way of light and to represent it on the landscapes of philosophical science and education. The history of the Institute, especially, in the period of its post-totalitarian transformations, gives the opportunity of taking comparison with the Institute for Social Research Frankfurt. The civic courage of the Ukrainian intellectual elites was always initiated, supported and generated by philosophers gathering in Institute of Philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spirit and Politics: Some Thoughts on Margaret Watkins’s The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s “Essays”Andre C. Willis (bio)Margaret Watkins’s elegant text, The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s Essays (2019),1 is marked by a Humean approach: it fosters philosophical consideration of both the faculties of the mind and the affective features of experience in ways that bear on practical, moral issues. Ever-attentive to the meaning of Hume’s various (...) nuances and strategic ambiguities, Watkins’s even-handed approach guides us into a broad swath of Hume’s ideas and marches us through a trajectory of secondary interlocutors. It also establishes Watkins as an integral part of Hume’s lineage, in the sense that she understands that thoughtful writing itself is an intellectual virtue. Her “unusual sensitivity, not to life’s daily vicissitudes but to beauties and deformities” (193)2 richly textures her overall argument that positions Hume’s Essays as a filter for his vision of “true philosophy:” that reflective turn towards nature and common life that openly challenges abstruse reasoning, fluently embraces historicism and perspectivalism, and deftly foregrounds the usefulness of ideas over their logical certainty.As much as Watkins reveals Hume’s vision for philosophy, she also extends it; for, among other things, her consideration of Hume’s unique endeavor in philosophical literature (ultimately collected under the title Essays, Moral, Political and Literary [1758]), makes an important twofold contribution to Hume studies. It brings greater attention to Hume’s notion of “public spirit,” a distinct mode of human excellence that combines “benevolence” with “greatness of mind.” And, it aestheticizes some practical dimensions of human life (noted in chapter titles, for example, “Working,” [End Page 143] “Thinking,” “Loving”) without losing track of their socio-political valences. I shall return to these two main points below. As an introductory gesture, I want to note that Watkins’s writing both nicely elaborates Hume’s philosophical vision and thoughtfully broadens his literary insights. It does “the job of putting the audience into a responsive relation with the work of art,” what literary critic R. P. Blackmur identified as “the job of intermediary.”3Generally speaking, Watkins’s mediation filters salient themes and terms from Hume’s corpus through a particularly close reading of the Essays. Cast through her richly stylized analysis, Hume’s foundational ideas of “sympathy,” “convention,” “impressions,” “association,” “imagination,” “artifice,” the “passions” (and more) find fresh interpretive air. An example of this in her first chapter tracks Hume’s use of both “artifice” and “convention” from the Treatise through the second Enquiry to the Essays. For Watkins, a through-line for Hume is that “governing” can be thought of as repeated actions that bridge institutional policy to individual character. To think about governing in this way is to open ourselves to new ways of conceiving potential overlaps between nature and artifice (say, in the instance of a moral virtue like courage [50]). To link categories in the Essays back to their antecedent texts along the lines that Watkins does is to situate them in the context of Hume’s larger thought-project and, indirectly, confirm connections between the individual essays. These conjoinings, for Watkins, suggest Hume’s Essays can be treated together, without either blending their disparate themes or diluting their individual subject matter.4This point stands in opposition to Hume’s own semi-admonishment (1741) that “The Reader must not look for any connexion among these Essays but must consider each of them as a Work apart.”5 Watkins’s response—indicative of the graciousness of her overall tone—is to warmly acknowledge Hume’s reproach and affirm the distinctiveness of each of the essays. She proclaims: “The Essays are not unified” (5). Her thinking about them separately, however, reveals a common practical thread in their form. Watkins characterizes this form as serving “to promote public benefit” (4). I think about this form as being philosophical in the way that Richard Rorty conceives of philosophy as cultural criticism. Watkins, however, wants to emphasize the public character of Hume’s philosophy. She writes: “Hume seeks to benefit the public in two ways. First, he tries to allay irrational attitudes that produce imprudent personal and... (shrink)

This paper offers a philosophical interpretation of belief in the spirits of the dead in Africa, with a view to identifying rational grounds for accepting or rejecting them. This endeavour is premised on the view that in this rapidly changing world,philosophy should inquire not only in to theoretical problems, but also into practical ones. Plato and Aristotle’s theories of the soul being some of the most carefully discussed philosophical theories on immortality or lack of it, will provide the (...) background of deliberation in this paper. (shrink)

Daniel Fernald argues that the rhetoric and imagery of the Phenomenology constitute the substance of the Phenomenology. His conclusion shows the entire Phenomenology to be an aporia, an impasse designed to teach the central lesson that the True, which is the Whole, is not to be found in phenomenal experience alone. Understanding the structure of Phenomenology is essential in the transition to Science of Logic.

Edification 教化 is one of the central concepts of Confucianism. The metaphysical basis of the Confucian edification is the “philosophical theory” in the sense of rational humanism rather than the “religious doctrine” in the sense of pure faith. Confucianism did not create a system of ceremony and propriety owned by Confucians only. The system of ceremony and propriety on which Confucians depend to carry out their social edification is that of “rites and music,” the common life style of ancient (...) China. After continual metaphysical explanation and elevation, the system of ceremony and propriety and that of rites and music have undergone a sort of ever-evolving historical fluctuation, and evinced a sort of openness and forgiveness comparable to that of any other religious form. Compared with typical religious practices, whose ceremonies and rituals that have their own special fixity and exclusivity, Confucian ceremonies and rituals are fundamentally different. The edification of Confucianism can be labeled as “edification in the sense of philosophy.” As a “philosophy”, Confucianism’s vision did not focus on cognition but on completion and realization. (shrink)

Female Soul and Feminine Spirit. Philosophical Prolegomena to a New (Women) Culture in the Interwar Radio Lectures Alice Voinescu’s and Constantin Noica’s. The newly founded Romanian Radio (1927) invited since 1930 the most important personalities of the Romanian culture to speak in the frame of different radio conferences. Two of these personalities were the philosophers Alice Voinescu (1885-1961) and Constantin Noica (1909-1987). Although they represent two different philosophical orientations (Alice Voinescu as a post-metaphysical thinker and Constantin Noica (...) as a philosopher, who tries, like Heidegger in the German culture, to rebuild metaphysics), the two interwar Romanian thinkers meet each other in some philosophical topics. One of these is the critical manner, how they are thinking about the movement of the emancipation of women in the 20thcentury. Both of them agree that the female soul and the feminine spirit have not to lose their specific features in the tendency to become active in the frame of the public sphere. In their critical thinking, Alice Voinescu and Constantin Noica meet the philosophical ideas of German philosophers like Georg Simmel and Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

Psychology without genuinely thoughtful philosophy winds up as self-help gimmicks; philosophy without the insights & feeling of psychology remains an arcane academic game out of touch with life. By re-joining spirit & soul, this book is a major work of both philosophy & psychology. Casey asks puzzling questions & gives lasting answers. In a clear & vivid manner, one of America's best professional thinkers takes up one of the great themes of imagination, fantasy, hallucination, remembering & perceiving. Film & (...) architecture provide surprising material for his brilliant & useful account of basic philosophical problems which are also major mysteries of the soul. (shrink)

지난 이명박 정부는 국민의 의사에 반하여 법과 절차를 어겨가며 국민의 생태자산인 생태계를 파괴하는 4대강 사업을 추진하였다. 이는 결과적으로 국민이 향유할 수 있는 생태자산에 따른 생태적 기본소득을 박탈한 것이며 동시에 국민이 공유한 자산을 국책사업이라는 미명하에 소수의 자산으로 사유화한 것이다. 이런 소수의 탐욕을 위한 국책사업이 진행될 수 있었던 근원적인 바탕은 사회에 팽배해 있는 그릇된 환경 가치관에 있다. 다시 말해서 4대강 사업은 ‘부국환경(富國環境)’이라는 환경을 단순히 부를 축적하기 위한 자원으로만 보는 탐욕의 환경 가치관이 사회 전반에 퍼져 있기 때문에 가능했다. 이런 사회적 상황에서 소수의 개인적 (...) 이득이 4대강 사업의 근원적인 동인이 되었으며, 사회 구조적 강제에 의해 무기력해진 다수는 사회적 결정에서 소외되었거나 생계유지에 급급해 4대강 사업을 묵인한 것처럼 보였다. 그런데 더욱 심각한 것은 자연 환경의 본래적 가치를 계몽해야 하는 환경교육이 무기력함을 넘어 오히려 환경 파괴의 사업을 정당화하는 작업에 앞장서며 탐욕의 환경 가치관을 확립하고 전파하려했다는 것이다. 따라서 이런 환경훼손의 국책사업이 다시 반복되지 않게 하기 위해서는 환경교육이 제대로 된 얼(철학)을 바탕으로 자연환경의 보존을 실천하는 중심이 되도록 해야 한다. 이를 위해 환경철학은 인간의 희노애락과는 무관하게 존재할 자연의 권리에 대한 담론을 확고한 이념으로 확립하여 환경교육에 얼을 심어주어야 할 것이다. (shrink)

Among philosophers in the period of change between the late 18th and early 19th centuries it was a widespread conviction that, because the status of a demonstrative theory made up of axioms and proofs was neither available nor desirable for philosophy, philosophical critique would also not be external to the business of philosophy. Rather it was to belong to the essence of philosophy itself. Against this background Hegel occupied himself almost from the beginning of his philosophical thinking with (...) the question of how a critique that is also able to convince an adherent of a theory differing from one’s own should proceed. Initially it must provide him with a description of his standpoint that he himself can accept. Moreover, the critique must tie up with a method of examination that is part of this standpoint itself, because its adherent would not otherwise have to agree to the procedure. Hegel is interested in this matter not only as a description of the hermeneutic situation in which the adherents of two particular, opposing positions find themselves. Rather, he asks himself whether an idea for the procedure of philosophical critique that commits itself to such considerations can also be generalized. This would require giving a minimalist description of the starting point in a way that allows as large a spectrum as possible of positions that are to be the object of the critique to recognize themselves within it. And the procedure of the critique must be able to be developed from this description itself. (shrink)

The ArgumentRecent historiography of the Scientific Revolution has challenged the assumption that the achievements of seventeenth-century natural philosophy can easily be described as the ‘mechanization of the world-picture.’ That assumption licensed a story which took mechanization as self-evidently progressive and so in no need of further historical analysis. The clock-work world was triumphant and inevitably so. However, a close examination of one key group of natural philosophers working in England during the 1670s shows that their program necessarily incorporated souls and (...) spirits, attractions and congruities, within both their ontology and their epistemology. Any natural philosophical strategy which excluded spirits and sympathies from its world was condemned as tending to subversion and irreligion. This examination shows that the term ‘mechanical philosophy’ was a category given its meanings within local contexts and carries no universal sense separate from that accomplished by these natural philosophers. It also shows how the experimental praxis was compelled to treat souls and spirits, to produce them through experimental labor, and then to extend these experimentally developed entities throughout the cosmos, both social and natural. The development of mechanical philosophy cannot be used to explain the cognitive and social structure of this program, nor its success: instead, the historical setting of experimental work shows how a philosophy of matter and spirit was deliberately constructed by the end of the seventeenth century. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFeminists have long criticized Rousseau for his patriarchal political theory. But when his lesser-known writings on women from the 1740s are taken into account, including a nearly 900-page manuscript critiquing Montesquieu from a feminist perspective, we see how the early Rousseau robustly converged in feminist ideas with his employer Madame Louise Dupin, before he gradually diverged from this egalitarian school of thought over the course of the 1750s. I add to the evidence of the early Rousseau’s egalitarian response to ‘the (...) woman question’ by showing his philosophical convergence with the feminist arguments of the anonymous ‘Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’ as well as Madame Dupin’s ‘Ouvrage sur les femmes’ – manuscripts largely in his secretarial hand. Through this triangulation of understudied texts, we find that the early Rousseau was not a patriarchal apologist, but rather a feminist secretary and a secretary to a feminist. (shrink)

Collaborative work with Robert S. Brumbaugh, first published in 1950. This work, intended as a textbook for undergraduates and also as a reader for the literate layperson, is a survey of Western philosophy from its beginnings until the mid-point of the t20th century. The chapters are divided according to traditional historical markers with Stallknecht and Brumbaugh also providing chapters on the major movements in philosophy from 1850 to 1950, and discussions of moral philosophy as well as symbolic logic.

The Spirit of the Soil challenges environmentalists to think more deeply and creatively about agriculture. Paul B. Thompson identifies four `worldviews' which tackle agricultural ethics according to different philosophical priorities; productionism, stewardship, economics and holism. He examines current issues such as the use of pesticides and biotechnology from these ethical perspectives. This book achieves an open-ended account of sustainability designed to minimise hubris and help us to recapture the spirit of the soil.

Hegel broke open the deadliest assumptions of Western thought by conceiving being as becoming and consciousness as the social-subjective relation of spirit to itself, yet his white Eurocentric conceits were grotesquely inflated even by the standards of his time. With In a Post-Hegelian Spirit, Gary Dorrien emphasizes both sides of this Hegelian legacy, contending that it takes a great deal of digging and refuting to recover the parts of Hegel that still matter for religious thought. By distilling his (...) signature argument about the role of post-Kantian idealism in modern Christian thought, Dorrien fashions a liberationist form of religious idealism: a post-Hegelian religious philosophy that is simultaneously both Hegelian as it expounds a fluid, holistic, open, intersubjective, ambiguous, tragic, and reconciliatory idea of revelation and post-Hegelian, as it rejects the deep-seated flaws in Hegel's thought. Dorrien mines Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel as the foundation of his argument about intellectual intuition and the creative power of subjectivity. After analyzing critiques of Hegel by SA, ren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Karl Barth, and Emmanuel Levinas, Dorrien contends that though these monumental figures were penetrating in their assessments, they appear one-sided compared to Hegel. In a Post-Hegelian Spirit further engages with the personal idealist tradition founded by Borden Parker Bowne, the process tradition founded by Alfred North Whitehead, and the daring cultural contributions of Paul Tillich, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosemary Radford Ruether, David Tracy, Peter Hodgson, Edward Farley, Catherine Keller, and Monica Coleman. (shrink)

This article, which appeared in the Library of Living Philosophers series, is a thought experiment that imagines Danto’s analytical framework reaching well beyond what he had called the “drab” state of philosophy in the early 2000s. It describes, in minimalist terms, what he saw as the fundamental project of all philosophy -- regardless of the specific theoretical content any particular philosopher might put forth. It discusses his central (and still underdeveloped) notion of representation, and his quasi-Hegelian view of how art (...) theory has been altered by its own recently emerging self-consciousness. It draws out the implications of his Argument from Intelligibility, which informs Danto’s interest in human self-consciousness, in autonomy, and (somewhat speculatively) in “spirit.”. (shrink)

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is probably his most famous work. First published in 1807, it has exercised considerable influence on subsequent thinkers from Feuerbach and Marx to Heidegger, Kojève, Adorno and Derrida. The book contains many memorable analyses of, for example, the master / slave dialectic, the unhappy consciousness, Sophocles' Antigone and the French Revolution and is one of the most important works in the Western philosophical tradition. It is, however, a difficult and challenging book and needs to (...) be studied together with a clear and accessible secondary text. Stephen Houlgate's Reader's Guide offers guidance on: Philosophical and historical context Key themes Reading the textReception and influence Further reading. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on different aspects of the hermeneutical problem in post-Kantian philosophical 'constellation'. In this domain, the problem of the relationship between the text and its commentary is theorized in terms of the antithesis between 'Spirit' and 'Letter', which clearly has religious roots. Therefore, the first part of the paper examines the historical origins of this antithesis, as well as its application in philosophical discussions which developed by the end of (...) the 18th century about the problem of finding the 'true' interpretation to Kant's philosophy. The second part of the text, which is to be published in the next issue of this review, brings the duality of spiritual and literal interpretation into closer connection with the topics of Kant's moral philosophy. Namera ovog rada je da osvetli razlicite aspekte hermeneutickog problema u poslekantovskoj filozofskoj 'konstelaciji'. U ovom podrucju, problem odnosa izmedju teksta i komentara postavlja se u terminima antiteze izmedju 'duha' i 'slova', koja ima prepoznatljive religijske korene. Zato prvi deo rada istrazuje istorijsko poreklo ove antiteze, kao i njenu primenu u filozofskim diskusijama koje su se krajem 18. veka razvile povodom problema pronalazenja 'pravog' tumacenja Kantove filozofije. U drugom delu rada, koji ce biti objavljen u sledecem broju casopisa, dvojnost duhovnog i doslovnog tumacenja dovodi se u uzu vezu sa tematikom Kantove teorije morala. (shrink)

With Spirits and Clocks, Dennis Des Chene completes a two-part project begun with Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul. In both volumes, Des Chene is concerned with the question of what makes living things living. For the Jesuit Aristotelians, the answer requires a complex analysis of the ontology of soul and power. For Descartes, of course, the answer is completely different; arguably, there is a sense in which his answer is: nothing. Indeed Des Chene does argue this, concluding (...) that for Descartes there are no living things in the Aristotelian sense: the body machine does not live, because it has no powers; the soul does not live because it has no role in nutrition, growth, and generation. Descartes’s physiology thus represents the most radical aspect of his natural philosophy, for he must eliminate souls from living things as part of the general project of eliminating Aristotelian forms from nature. As such, the importance of Descartes’s physiology is manifest; Des Chene’s study is a very welcome and original addition to the still-modest philosophical literature engaged with Descartes’sL’Homme and La description du corps humain. (shrink)

Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings are embedded in a logic of the imagination, clothing spirits in the languages of air, clouds, light and shadow, glass, and ether itself. Moving from Wax to Film, the book also discusses key questions of imagination and cognition, and probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception; (...) it uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture. It reveals how their transformations over time illuminate changing ideas about the self. Phantasmagoria also tells the accompanying story about the means used to communicate such ideas, and relates how the new technologies of the Victorian era were applied to figuring the invisible and the impalpable, and how magic lanterns (the phantasmagoria shows themselves), radio, photography and then moving pictures spread ideas about spirit forces. As the story unfolds, the book features the many eminent men and women--scientists and philosophers--who in the Society of Psychical Research applied their considerable energies to the question of other worlds and other states of mind: they staged trance seances in which mediums produced spirit phenomena, including ectoplasm. The book shows how this often embarrassing story connects with some of the important scientific discoveries of a fertile age, in psychology and physics. Over a sequence of twenty-eight chapters, with over thirty illustrations in color and black and white, Phantasmagoria thus tells an unexpected and often uncomfortable story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self as in the case of the zombie, a popular figure of soulessness, in modern times. (shrink)

A recently widely accepted view has it that the nature-spirit distinction in Hegel is to be understood as a distinction between a space or realm that is not normative or does not involve norms, and one that is or does. Notwithstanding the merits of this view, it has tended to create a separation between nature and spirit which is both philosophically troubling and difficult to reconcile with the picture of Hegel as the arch enemy of abstract or unreconciled (...) dualisms. In this paper I aim to show that the defining phenomenon for this view—collective self-government by norms—is on Hegel’s account both dependent on living nature that involves normativity broadly conceived all the way down and also subject to the normative or evaluative super-principle of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit—concrete freedom—the essence of spirit according to him. This is to say that for Hegel the normativity of collectively administered norms is neither the most basic nor the highest form of normativity. -/- Published online first 27 January 2021. (shrink)

The civic republican tradition in political thought includes Niccolo Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville. The belief that it is imperative that citizens participate actively and disinterestedly in public affairs, i.e., that they possess "civic virtue" or "public spirit" is a prominent family resemblance between its members. Civic republican thought has undergone a recent resurgence, and one consequence is that political philosophers and other theorists have begun to ask whether liberals can take civic virtue seriously. Certain critics of (...) liberalism, including Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor, have answered this question in the negative. They give a variety of reasons for this answer, ranging from the inability of the atomistic ontologies underlying many liberal theories to make sense of the existence of a common good to the inability of the liberal state to concern itself with the character of its citizens. ;For the most part, unsurprisingly, these antiliberals direct their arguments at the work of twentieth-century "deontological" liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. While Rawls and Dworkin say relatively little about civic virtue, many earlier liberals believed firmly in its importance. John Stuart Mill's centrality to the liberal tradition and the thoroughgoing nature of his liberalism make him an especially interesting "civic liberal." My central thesis is that the civic and liberal components of his political philosophy combine to form a coherent whole. In my early exegetical chapters I provide the first systematic exposition of the frequently ignored civic component. I then address the work of several of Mill's interpreters who either explicitly or implicitly point to possible problems with his attempt to weave together the civic and liberal strands in his thought, and conclude that these problems are either not real or not insoluble. Finally, I consider whether the arguments which Sandel and Taylor, et. al., have given to show that contemporary liberal theories cannot consistently incorporate the civic republican belief in the importance of active and disinterested civic participation might have force against Mill. I show that they do not, and not simply because On Liberty is not A Theory of Justice but because the many of the objections are poorly reasoned. (shrink)

The Spirit of Secular Art: A History of the Sacramental Roots of Contemporary Artistic Values explains the spiritual prestige of art. Various theorists have discussed how art has an aura or indefinable magic. This book explains how, when and why it gained its spiritual properties. The idea that all art is somehow spiritual (even though not religious) is often assumed; this book, while narrating the historical trajectory of art in the most accessible language, reveals how the mysteries of religious (...) practice are abstracted and saved through all stages of secularisation in European culture. The Spirit of Secular Art presents a coherent theory defining the sacred basis of Western aesthetics. It evocatively describes the afterlife of the holy from Ancient Greece to the present, and outlines how the mysterious institution of art can be explained in material terms. Unlike other books in the genre, The Spirit of Secular Art radically deconstructs traditional art history in terms of 'prestige' and the value of the non-material. The book functions as: an alternative critical history of art, integrated with the histories of literature and belief; a philosophical essay on the fundamental values of art and religion; and a critique of the spiritual conceits of contemporary aesthetics and art appreciation. (shrink)

Though concise and introductory, this book argues inter alia that Dretske’s information-theoretic epistemology must take into account that many of our information channels are socially constructed, not least through learning concepts and information. These social aspects of human knowledge are consistent with realism about the objects of our empirical knowledge. It further argues that, though important, Margaret Gilbert’s social ontology in principle can neither accommodate nor account for the most fundamental social dimensions of human cognition.

A READING OF HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT by Quentin Lauer. Fordham U.P., 1976. vii+303 pp. $20 cloth, $7.50 paper.HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY – A PHILOSOPHICAL INTRODUCTION by Richard Norman. Sussex U.P., 1976. 139 pp. £4 cloth, £2.25 paper.

Forty different personalities--ranging from desert naturalists to priests and philosophers, from airplane pilots and explorers to teachers and scientists--setting forth their most intense personal observations, experiences and crises in their lives and thought. In fact, fiction and in reflection, forty different humans react in their own private, personal and spiritual way to what is for them the deepest mode of life. (Book jacket).

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that no matter how many objective facts we may know about bats, we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. There is an irreducible subjectivity to the experience of being a bat. I can only imagine what it would be like for a subject like me to be a bat but never what it is like for the actual bat to be a bat.In her book, Benvenuti demonstrates extraordinary sensitivity to (...) the subjectivity of the nonhuman animals she discusses. In addition to being an organic farmer in southern Italy, Benvenuti is also a licensed psychologist. Her training and interest in neurobiology is evident throughout the work. She walks the middle path between human exceptionalism (the “old meme” as she puts it of humans being “distinct from” and “superior to” all other animals, p. 15) on the one side and collapsing the differences on the other. While she might agree with the thrust of Nagel's claim (she never mentions him in the book) that we cannot truly know what it is like to be a bat, we are not so different to bats that we cannot empathetically understand something of a bat's experiences. We are, after all, kin. Kinship, she argues, rather than “distinct and superior” is the more correct scientific understanding (p. 18).Her work is clearly influenced by that of her mentor, Jaak Panksepp, on affective neurobiology. Like the biologist and ethologist Marc Bekoff, Benvenuti argues that it is possible to be “biocentrically anthropomorphic and do rigorous science” (p. 66). Of course, kinship does not entail sameness. “The central core of my life's work,” Benvenuti writes, “is to articulate the grounds for real relationships between humans and other animals. This implies the capacity to empathize accurately and to be able to communicate across species differences, but also the capacity to recognize that the other is not ‘just like me’” (p. 82). Importantly for her, it is not just our learning about other animals but our learning from them and they from us. It is the complex—and it is very complex—relationship that matters.Kindred Spirits is a beautifully written book, part travelogue, part personal anecdotes, with a nice mixture of scientific and philosophical musings. It begins in her own backyard (in the United States at the time) with a friendship struck up with a crow named Jason and then transports us to destinations around the world and species including bees, dogs, elephants, cheetahs, whales, and rescued farmed animals. Benvenuti spends much of her time with people trying to research, rescue, and rehabilitate endangered species. Above all, she intends it as a hopeful book. She finds great inspiration and hope in the fact that so many people around the world care about animals. She finds hope in the decline of circuses that merely use and abuse animals for human entertainment. She points to the growing understanding of animal studies and general interest in animals’ internal lives and feelings.The book makes a useful contribution to the growing literature of cognitive ethology. It is along similar lines as the works of Marc Bekoff and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. For those of us already convinced of our kinship and similarity with nonhuman animals, there are inspiring stories of others engaged in trying to save the world, or at least the part of it they can. One of the real strengths of the book is the constant questioning of the animal's experience. While we all appreciate those “animal ambassadors” who come to represent their kind and educate us, Benvenuti raises the important ethical question as to whether those animals want to be ambassadors at all. Sometimes a quick bite, as she once received from an African gray parrot, is enough to remind us to mind our manners around other species. It was a lesson in respecting differences and boundaries. The book does in the end inspire hope that if enough European and American scientists continue to advance the study of animal intelligence and emotion, we might one day come to the understanding that our indigenous brothers and sisters around the world have had since the beginning—that we, human and nonhuman, are all kin. (shrink)

Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book I, Radical Scholarship, published in modified open-access form by Punctum Books, Brooklyn, New York, in association with the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons/The New School, New York, New York, launches a three-volume “anthology” series that will survey forms of contemporary scholarship and issues related to Intellectual Property Rights in the age of Cognitive Capital. The primary focus of the critical project is the Moral Rights of Authors, foremost as scholarship and artistic production confronts the post-digital (...) age, and as quantitative and pseudo-scientific operations overtake both conventional and avant-garde forms of humanistic research. -/- The six essays contained within Book One function as a preliminary summary for an extended “phenomenology of scholarship” based in creative and hybrid forms of publication, presentation, and dissemination, plus the editioning of works of scholarship as forms of art, and works of art as forms of scholarship. Begun in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in August 2014, the book concludes with an up-to-date summary (“Publishing Advisory”) for meeting, exceeding, and subverting the standards of present-day scholarship in the Arts and Humanities. The philosophical and pragmatic project privileges a “down-market” strategy for scholarship (albeit, toward moving “upstream”) –- in part by renouncing digital rights (formulated in “Franciscan” mode as “the right to have no digital rights”). (shrink)

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807, is a work with few equals in systematic integrity, philosophical originality and historical influence. This collection of essays, contributed by leading Hegel scholars, examines all aspects of the work, from its argumentative strategies to its continuing relevance to philosophical debates. The collection combines close analysis with wide-ranging coverage of the text, and also traces connections with debates extending beyond Hegel scholarship, including issues in the philosophy of language, philosophy of (...) mind, philosophy of action, ethics, and philosophy of religion. In showing clearly that we have not yet exhausted the Phenomenology's insights, it demonstrates the need for contemporary philosophers to engage with Hegel. (shrink)

_I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start._ These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, _The Spirit of Utopia,_ written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation. _The Spirit of Utopia_ is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is (...) not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's _Spirit of Utopia_ is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation—which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto—concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." _I am. We are._ That's hardly anything. But enough _to start._. (shrink)

Full-length studies of individual books of Nietzsche have been lacking until now both because of the immaturity of the field and because Nietzsche's style itself seems to contraindicate them. Close reading, however, reveals a great deal of literary and philosophical unity. This holds good even of Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche's longest and most unwieldy work. The book represents Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer and Wagner, as well as the birth of Nietzsche as we know him in the later works. The book's (...) embrace of science as conducive to culture follows the early works' vilification of science as anathema to culture. This reassessment is possible because science is now seen as a method and a discipline rather than an insatiable drive for knowledge, and culture is now a broad set of symbols and activities rather than a narrowly focussed "unity of artistic style." Both changes were motivated by Nietzsche's rejection of Wagner. Part of the help science provides culture is its release from restrictive metaphysical beliefs. Nietzsche battles metaphysics, principally that of Schopenhauer, by means of scientific arguments meant both to provide alternative explanations of phenomena and to expose the origin of countervailing metaphysical beliefs. However, even when combined in a two-pronged attack, these arguments still fall short of their goal of refuting metaphysics. The scientific world-view may nonetheless aid the development of "free spirits," whose unalloyed devotion to knowledge makes them science's paragons. The free spirits are the prototypes for the later works' strong individuals, yet here they are viewed as crucial elements in the cultural development of general society. Nietzsche seeks both to create them and to encourage their devotion to the needs of culture. Part of his effort to do this is the deployment of a terse, elliptical style which will involve the reader more thoroughly than can be done by means of argument alone. Study of the book's structure reveals that its core, Parts 1, 5, and 9, outlines the relation between science, culture, and free spirits. (shrink)

Philosophizing, according to E. Martens, can be seen as an elemental cultural technology, like arithmetic or writing, which both can and should be acquired in childhood. Martens is proposing here an understanding of philosophy that attributes value not only to the content canon, but also to the process itself, as Wittgenstein, for one, also did when he stated in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Philosophy is not a doctrine, but an activity.” For Socrates, this activity consisted in “giving an account of ourselves, (...) our knowledge, our way of life.” In Nietzsche’s view, the precondition for this kind of accounting is the personal capacity for self-distancing, which allows us to grasp our quite individual primal experiences of emotion, perception, sudden illuminations of insight, and so on, as general concepts and logical structures. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Spirit was Hegel's grandest experiement, changing our vision of the world and the very nature of philosophical enterprise. In this book, Solomon captures the bold and exhilarating spirit, presenting the Phenomenology as a thoroughly personal as well as philosophical work. He begins with a historical introduction, which lays the groundwork for a section-by-section analysis of the Phenomenology. Both the initiated as well as readers unacquainted with the intricacies of German idealism will find this (...) to be an accessible and exciting introduction to this great philosopher's monumental work. (shrink)

Edification 教化 is one of the central concepts of Confucianism. The metaphysical basis of the Confucian edification is the “philosophical theory” in the sense of rational humanism rather than the “religious doctrine” in the sense of pure faith. Confucianism did not create a system of ceremony and propriety owned by Confucians only. The system of ceremony and propriety on which Confucians depend to carry out their social edification is that of “rites and music,” the common life style of ancient (...) China. After continual metaphysical explanation and elevation, the system of ceremony and propriety and that of rites and music have undergone a sort of ever-evolving historical fluctuation, and evinced a sort of openness and forgiveness comparable to that of any other religious form. Compared with typical religious practices, whose ceremonies and rituals that have their own special fixity and exclusivity, Confucian ceremonies and rituals are fundamentally different. The edification of Confucianism can be labeled as “edification in the sense of philosophy.” As a “philosophy”, Confucianism’s vision did not focus on cognition but on completion and realization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology by Robert B. BrandomJacob L. GoodsonA Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. By Robert B. Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 856 pp. $50.00 hardcover.What a feat: an interpretation of G. F. W. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that is longer than the Phenomenology of Spirit itself! With 757 pages of text, and (...) reportedly a work that took Robert B. Brandom over 40 years to write, A Spirit of Trust accomplishes much and offers an interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology that mixes epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind.Hegel scholars will be discontent with Brandom’s heavily analytic interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Analytic philosophers will be discontent with attributing to Hegel arguments and insights often attributed to Frege (this happens so often one reviewer says of Brandom’s book that he should call Hegel Fregel—a mix of Frege and Hegel). Scholars of American Philosophy might be the most excited by reading Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust because he goes out of his way to put Hegel in conversation with Donald Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and others who are part of the American philosophical tradition.Such excitement, however, might eventually be tempered when one realizes that Brandom is no defender of philosophical naturalism in A Spirit of Trust. Indeed, waiting until page 499, Brandom claims that the remainder of the book (another 250 pages) involves telling the story of how Hegel connects alienation with reductive naturalism. Brandom’s story involves developing a “nonreductive account of how we should understand the place of norms in the natural world” (499). Once we understand norms in a way that avoids or eschews naturalism, then we overcome the problem of alienation. Whereas Karl Marx blames alienation on capitalism, Brandom blames alienation on naturalism.In addition to the adjective “reductive,” Brandom offers three other adjectives for naturalism: “disenchanted” (see 263), “normative” (see 558), and “scientific” [End Page 97] (see 661–65). According to Brandom, the dominance of scientific naturalism is one of the reasons his interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology is required right now. Brandom thinks scientific naturalism has a stronghold on contemporary philosophy, and Hegel’s Phenomenology offers a corrective to this mistake in contemporary philosophy. Let us take each of these naturalisms in turn.1. Disenchanted Naturalism. Situating Hegel’s Phenomenology in relation to the problems Hegel wanted to address in his own day, Brandom claims: “Another strand of the early modern tradition that Hegel takes up and develops is the disenchanting naturalism about norms”—which is “most evident in the British sentimentalists... who give explanatory pride of place to practical attitudes of normative assessment, of reflective approval or disapproval by a distinctive moral faculty, which they see as... rooted in a characteristic sentiment, typically... benevolence” (263). Brandom admits that Kant also repairs the tradition of British sentimentalism, but one of the themes of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust involves how Kant’s emphasis on autonomy itself gets repaired by Hegel’s focus on recognition. Hence Kant’s repair of disenchanted naturalism remains necessary but insufficient. On Brandom’s interpretation, Hegel’s theory of recognition properly repairs both disenchanted naturalism and Kant’s theory of autonomy.2. Normative Naturalism. Staying with Hegel’s repair of Kant’s philosophy, Brandom finds a version of naturalism in Kant’s thinking as well. This version is normative naturalism, which attempts to “integrate reasons and causes” (558). Brandom claims, “This project, broadly construed, is to provide a response to Kant’s Third Antimony—the challenge to integrate reasons and causes. A significant proportion of Hegel’s claim... should be seen as deriving from his response to this issue of normative naturalism. So the stakes are very high” (558). Brandom’s rhetoric here reflects one of the annoyances of the book: every problem driving Hegel’s Phenomenology is the most important problem driving Hegel’s Phenomenology. The stakes are always high, and Brandom does not signal to the reader any way to rank the problems Hegel addresses in Phenomenology.According to Brandom, Hegel repairs Kant’s normative naturalism by separating reasons... (shrink)

V. Hösle’s most important philosophical contribution is in his systematic attempt at grasping the philosophical problems, especially ontological, axiological and ecological ones, as one whole. The author examines several of these problems, especially with regard to the universalistic conception of ethics and the relationship between nature and spirit as manifested in the particular spheres of Hösles’s philosophical concern: his conception of the ecological crisis as a metaphysical one, the meaning of natural law, the question of collective (...) indentities etc. In conclusion the author outlines his vision of an ethics for the 21st century including its political dimension. (shrink)