Several differences between these two texts are evident even from such brief excerpts. Gardner’s story is told in the first person; the eighth-century tale is narrated in the third person. English itself has changed so much in the past twelve centuries that few readers can understand the original, so it must be translated into modern idiom. John Gardner, who died recently in a motorcycle accident, lived in a society that has little in common with that of the unknown author of (...) Beowulf. Not only is the atomic age filled with terrors undreamed by the Medieval mind, the Weltanschauung of each work is different. Although both draw upon Biblical texts to shape the background, Gardner’s existentialism contrasts sharply with the Christianity implicit in Beowulf. The very idea of presenting the story from the perspective of Grendel shows how fundamentally the two pieces diverge. (shrink)

As Descartes noted, a proper account of the nature of the being one is begins with a basic self present in first-person experience, a self that one cannot cogently doubt being. This paper seeks to uncover such a self, first within consciousness and thinking, then within the lived or first-person felt body. After noting the lack of grounding of Merleau-Ponty’s commonly referenced reflections, it undertakes a phenomenological investigation of the body that finds the basic self to reside in one’s espoused (...) feelings and striving, both bodily in nature. It then examines the relationship of the lived body to the visual body and to the body studied by science. Two issues concerning that relationship are taken up. It is concluded that on the available evidence neither the apparent agency nor the apparent free will of the lived body is illusory. (shrink)

This book is concerned with 'how' to think about justice rather than 'what' to think about justice. Its dialectical approach to justice offers a postmodern philosophy which is universal without being absolutist. This stands as an alternative to claims of certainty about justice and to the denials of such certainty in the modern era. to the literary culture of England.

In recent years it has become popular to model putative refutations of skepticism on Kant's answer to Hume, that is, on transcendental arguments purporting to show that the skeptical theses presupposes essential features of the very conceptual scheme they call into question. In his book, Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur makes the claim that transcendental considerations of the sort invalidate Edmund Husserl's foundationalist epistemological enterprise, that of uncovering the genesis of primitive concepts of oneself, world, and others in a primordial (...) solipsistic stage from which all trace of others is excluded. According to Ricoeur the concept of others must be presupposed throughout. This paper examines the experiential evidence for four of the transcendental arguments endorsed by Ricoeur, each treating one of four key concepts--the concept of oneself as subject, that of one's flesh, that of one's body, and that of other selves. It finds that in each case Ricoeur’s argument fails, and that in each case Husserl is right to claim that a rudimentary nonlinguistic concept may arise within the confines of first-person perceptual experience. The paper then briefly examines the source of Ricoeur's erroneous evaluation. (shrink)

The various roles proposed for emotion, whether psychological such as preparing for action or serving prior concerns, or biological such as protecting and promoting well-being, are easily shown to have an awkward number of exceptions. This paper attempts to explain why. To this end it undertakes a Husserlian phenomenological examination of first-person experience of two types of responses, the various somatic responses elicited by sensations (pain, cold, pleasure, sudden intensity) and the various personal directed emotions (grief, fear, affection, joy). The (...) analysis brings out the overall close structural symmetry between the two types of response and the strong hedonic, dynamic, and topological similarity between particular members from each of the two groups. The findings strongly suggest that emotions evolved from the more rudimentary involuntary somatic responses. The hypothesis finds further support in the fact that it explains both the biological unsoundness and anomalous archaic features that emotions often display. It also explains why emotions have no tidy function. (shrink)

This article is a sequel to ‘The Liar Syndrome’. It answers in detail the various criticisms of the latter expressed by Roy T. Cook in his article, ‘Curing the Liar Syndrome’, appearing in SATS/Nordic Journal of Philosophy, 3 (2): 126-141 (2002).