Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Friends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture by Richard B. MillerBill BarbieriFriends and Other Strangers: Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Culture Richard B. Miller new york: columbia university press, 2016. 416 pp. $60.00In his studies on casuistry, war and peace, pediatric ethics, and other occasional topics Richard B. Miller has for some time been a leading source of creative impulses in the field of religious (...) ethics, so it is a welcome event to have this volume organizing past essays of his into a thematically cohesive presentation. His book sets out a vision of the character and concerns of religious ethics that helps counter critics, such as Stanley Hauerwas, who have expressed skepticism about the field.The governing conception of Friends and Other Strangers is that the study of religious ethics is properly shaped by attending to how "our lives ineluctably oscillate between experiences of intimacy and otherness" (5). Accordingly, Miller seeks to guide the field beyond either a one-sided focus on matters of friendship and special relations or a preoccupation with alterity and heterology. To grasp how the dialectic of intimacy and alterity shapes the normative character of personal and public life, he recommends religious ethicists should employ "the category of culture as an organizing rubric" (6).In the book's initial section Miller elaborates on his view of the enterprise of religious ethics and its place in the broader intellectual landscape. In a discussion drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, and James Gustafson, Miller first offers his account of the characteristic concerns and history of the field. He then presents the case for a "cultural turn" in religious ethics, arguing not only that practitioners would benefit from incorporating anthropology and cultural studies into their work but that they should extend their ambit to normative questions throughout the academy. Responding to the problems of ethnocentrism and the moral authority of outsiders in criticizing cultural practices, Miller rounds out the section by proposing constructive norms for nonchauvinistic social criticism in multicultural contexts.Among the remaining essays are several that showcase Miller's appreciation of Augustine as a principal source of ethical insight. In a chapter scrutinizing the case for replacing disembodied patterns of moral reasoning with an "ethics of empathy," he proposes that Augustine's ethics of love can sharpen our grasp of both the possibilities and pitfalls of empathy as a moral value. Writing on friendship and evil, Miller invokes the Augustinian "theocentric imaginary" as a guide to how intimacy and alterity are balanced in friendship. And taking [End Page 194] up the ethics and social psychology of war, he presents Augustine's writings on the morality of killing as a source for just war standards that can be applied in cross-cultural normative criticism. That Augustine's seminal reflections on time and memory do not appear in a further chapter on "the moral and political burdens of memory" is a slight disappointment, no doubt attributable to the chapter's origins as a review essay.Other topics tellingly subjected to Miller's characteristically nuanced and sharp analysis include indignation and solidarity, responsibilities to children, and democracy and public reason. A bonus chapter collects six lengthy reviews of recent books—five on topics related to Islam—touted by Miller as exemplary in their embodiment of a cultural turn in religious ethics.Given its endorsement of a "cultural turn" in ethics, the book would have benefited from deeper reflection on discrete meanings of "culture," "cultures," and their various cognates. In addition, the individual chapters, originating in diverse settings, are not all equally well integrated into the book's governing themes. Overall, however, Miller's book amply succeeds in its Geertzian task of presenting both a model of and a model for the field of religious ethics. A fine distillation of the thought of a leading figure in the guild, it is essential reading for serious students of ethics.Bill BarbieriCatholic UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Canada is one of the few countries in the world—China is another—that has decriminalized abortion. In Canada, there are no legislative or judicial restrictions whatsoever on abortion: When, where, and under what circumstances abortions can be performed are all unregulated. In sharp contrast, abortion is generally illegal in South American and predominantly Catholic countries, as well as in African and Muslim countries. And the countries that do allow legal abortions, including most in Europe along with America, Australia, and Russia, typically (...) permit it only up to a certain time or make it subject to circumstances such as risk to the woman. In what follows we will first explain how Canada came to decriminalize abortion and then go on to assess that position from an ethical point of view. (shrink)

In Keeping Your Ethical Edge Sharp, Doug Sherman and Bill Hendricks discuss the critical issues that confront us in the workplace--possibly our most strategic sphere of influence today. They point put the obstacles that often keep our lights from shining in the darkness, and they present six principles we must be mindful of if we're to keep our ethical edge sharp and our witness distinctive.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Brisbane: Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares by William (Bill) MetcalfLyman Tower SargentWilliam (Bill) Metcalf. Brisbane: Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares. Brisbane History Group Studies no. 11. Tingalpa: Boolarong Press, 2022. 297 pp. Australian $30.00 ISBN: 9781922643445.Bill Metcalf, the foremost scholar on Australian intentional communities, has discovered and written about a number of Australian utopias. In Brisbane: Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares he focuses on a (...) subset of Australian utopias, those written by people who lived in Brisbane plus one Brisbane architect who made designs for a future utopian Brisbane. One of the books, A Workingman’s Paradise: An Australian Labour Novel (1892), is well known, particularly in Australia. A second novel, The Adventures of Halek: An Autobiographical Fragment (1882) by John H. Nicholson, will be familiar to some readers. The others will be unfamiliar to most readers both in Australia and in the rest of the world. I learned of many of them through Metcalf ’s previous work and correspondence with him. Given this situation and the fact that a few of the books are only available in Australia, I have said something about all of them.The book begins with “A Brief Overview of Utopianism” (1–6), an introduction suitable for those unfamiliar with the subject, followed by “Overview of Brisbane in the 1880s and 1890s” (7–12), which gives all readers an initial context. The entire book is strong on context, particularly local context. The following nine chapters are on authors or coauthors of utopian texts and one artist. All the chapters begin with substantial biographical information about the authors, as well as their activities and the Brisbane context within which they lived, followed by a presentation and discussion of their utopias. [End Page 158]The first authors mentioned are William and Annie Lane, which immediately raised a question in my mind. The two works discussed, the racist “White or Yellow? A Story of the Race-war of A.D. 1908” by Sketcher (serialized in The Boomerang in 1888), and the socialist A Workingman’s Paradise by John Maurice Miller, have always been identified as written by William Lane—with no mention of Annie. Metcalf suggests, but with minimal discussion, that while “White or Yellow” was by William, Annie was the unacknowledged coauthor, perhaps even author, of A Workingman’s Paradise. So, I asked Metcalf about the attribution and in a substantial email of October 5, 2022, he laid out the argument, which is based in part on the work of a former student, John Kellett, published as “One-Woman-One Vote: Annie Lane, ‘Lucinda Sharpe,’ and the Female Franchise in Late-Nineteenth Century Queensland” (Hecate 30, no. 2 [2004]: 37–52).Lucinda Sharpe was the nom de plume of a weekly contributor to the newspapers published by William Lane. It has been believed that he wrote all the articles. Kellett, however, makes a strong case that Annie, who was a working journalist in Canada when she met William (also a working journalist), was Lucinda Sharpe. In particular, Kellett notes the extreme differences between William’s usual style and that of Lucinda Sharpe and compares it to material known to be written by Annie. Kellett concludes, based on the similarities between Lucinda and Annie and other evidence, that Lucinda was Annie. But Kellett is only concerned with the Lucinda Sharpe works and the way they presented the case for the franchise; he does not mention either of the works that Metcalf discusses.In his email to me, Metcalf expands on Kellett, saying thatWhile researching for this book I re-read The Workingman’s Paradise and again I was struck by how the sentence structure and language differs from William Lane’s usual work. Then I compared it to “Lucinda Sharpe,” and it was similar. I discussed this observation with John Kellett, now retired and living in Armadale, and he agreed. That led me to conclude that Annie Lane probably wrote The Working Man’s Paradise. Perhaps/probably with William’s input. The real giveaway is when William tries to write in a female voice, as in White or Yellow with the Cissie character, it is very stilted, “twee” and demeaning. When... (shrink)

A high school drop-out who served in the American army and then managed to slip into Oxford on the G.I. bill, Frank Cioffi gained a considerable public reputation in Freudian and Wittgensteinian circles. Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Context is an account of his conversation is written in a Boswellian spirit, capturing the sharp intelligence, boisterous sense of humour and wealth of illustration Cioffi was able to bring to bear on life's biggest problems when he was, as if were, (...) off-duty. Tackling subjects such as the unruly body, the challenge of art, dealing with failure, the lure of science, the meaning of life, our understanding of others, depression, the case for suicide, and death, David Ellis describes how a philosopher who was profoundly influenced by Wittgenstein dealt with general issues and creates a vivid impression of an unusual and gifted individual. This portrait is followed by a post-script in which Nicholas Bunnin, who worked in the philosophy department at Essex when Cioffi was a professor there, situates him in a more strictly academic context and discusses his less well-known essays on literary criticism and the behavioural sciences, arguing for Cioffi's potential to inspire those seeking a role for analytic philosophy within the broader scope of humanistic philosophy. A mixture of personal portrait and academic introduction, Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Context provides an elegant and enjoyable tribute to Cioffi as both man and philosopher. (shrink)

Many scholars have investigated the relationship between protest and repression. Less often examined is the legislative suppression of protest by elites seeking to make protest more costly to protesters. Because state legislatures are largely invisible to the public, this “wholesale” suppression of protest is less likely to trigger public opposition than repression by the police. This study explains the sharp increase in the number and the severity of state legislative bills to repress the right to protest both before and after (...) the election of Donald Trump. In particular, it examines whether these can be attributed either to Republican control of state legislatures or to protest threat. Contrary to the findings in much of the literature, bills aimed at suppressing protest are less closely related to threat than to the realignment of state politics. The article also finds that these proposals were influenced by diffusion through policy brokerage. (shrink)

In The Art of Humane Education, Donald Phillip Verene presents a new statement of the classical and humanist ideals that he believes should guide education in the liberal arts and sciences. These ideals are lost, he contends, in the corporate atmosphere of the contemporary university, with its emphasis on administration, faculty careerism, and student performance. Verene addresses questions of how and what to teach and offers practical suggestions for the conduct of class sessions, the relationship between teacher and student, the (...) interpretation of texts, and the meaning and use of a canon of great books.In sharp contrast to the current tendency toward specialization, Verene considers the aim of college education to be self-knowledge pursued through study of all fields of thought. Education, in his view, must be based on acquisition of the arts of reading, writing, and thinking. He regards the class lecture as a form of oratory that should be presented in accordance with the well-known principles of rhetoric. The Art of Humane Education, styled as a series of letters, makes the author's original and practical ideas very clear. In this elegant book, Verene explores the full range of issues surrounding humane education.On the humanities: "Despite Descartes, the study of humane letters has remained, but it is always in danger of passing out of the curriculum. It remains a beggar who will not quite leave the premises."On teaching: "Like oratory, teaching requires a natural gift, but it is also an art which, like all the other humane arts, can be learned only mimetically.... As some are born tone-deaf and cannot be musical, there are those who can never teach. But most if they wish have some aptitude for it, and this aptitude can be developed into an art."On teachers: "Teachers motivated by eloquence attempt to speak wholly on a subject, since the whole is where its life is. Teachers not motivated by eloquence tend to be either dull or comedic. The dull teacher may have knowledge but have no true language for it.... The comedic teacher is shallow and a menace to the subject matter."On administrators: "Administration is never content simply to concern itself with the pure business of the university, paying its bills, maintaining its buildings. It sees itself as necessary in order for the process between teacher and student to go on. But it is a process that it constantly interrupts.... Administrators, however, should not be taken too seriously."Although sharply critical of many aspects of the modern university and of many currents within the humanities, The Art of Humane Education remains at heart a ringing endorsement of the high humanist tradition and its continuing relevance to the institutions of teaching and learning. (shrink)

In _Camus, Philosophe: To Return to our Beginnings_ Matthew Sharpe reads Camus as a _philosophe_ in the classical and enlightenment lineages, arguing that his defense of _mesure_ singles him out amidst 20th century French thought and makes him of renewed relevance today.

The ethical ideologies of psychologists and physicians were compared using the Ethics Position Questionnaire. The findings reveal that psychologists tend to be less relativistic than physicians. Further, we explored the degree to which physicians and psychologists report being influenced by a variety of factors in their ethical decision making. Psychologists were more influenced by their code of ethics and less influenced by family views, religious background, and peer attitudes than were physicians. We argue that these differences reflect the varied professional (...) cultures in which practitioners are trained and socialized. (shrink)

Animalism is the view that human persons are human animals – biological organisms that belong to the species Homo sapiens. This paper concerns a family of modal objections to animalism based on the essentiality of personhood (persons and animals differ in their persistence conditions; psychological considerations are relevant for the persistence of persons, but not animals; persons, but not animals, are essentially psychological beings). Such arguments are typically used to support constitutionalism, animalism’s main neo-Lockean rival. The problem with such arguments (...) is that they wrongly assume that animalism is incompatible with our essentially being psychological beings. In this paper, I discuss a formulation of animalism, what I call psychologically-serious animalism, according to which human persons are essentially human animals and essentially persons. I show how the availability of this neglected formulation of animalism undermines objections based on the essentiality of personhood. (shrink)

As in science, so in bioethics: if prohibiting conflicts of interest is not feasible, rigorous requirements for disclosure can at least manage them.

This study aimed to capture how the coronavirus disease 2019 crisis disrupted and affected individuals’ goal pursuits and self-efficacy beliefs early during the lockdown phase of COVID-19. Participants impacted by lockdown regulations accessed an online questionnaire during a 10-day window from the end of March to early April 2020 and reported a significant personal goal toward which they had been working, and then completed quantitative and qualitative survey items tapping self-efficacy beliefs for goal achievement, subjective caring about the goal during (...) disrupted world events, and current pursuit or abandonment of the goal. The findings from both quantitative and qualitative measures demonstrated a significant drop in self-efficacy beliefs from before to during the pandemic with a large effect based on whether people thought they could still achieve their goal under current conditions. Over two-thirds of the sample was unsure or did not believe they could still carry out their goal, and over a quarter either abandoned or were uncertain they could pursue the goal. Despite this, people continued to care about their goals. Reasons for abandonment and strategies for coping with goals within the lockdown and beyond are discussed. (shrink)

• We define a notion of order of indiscernibility type of a structure by analogy with Mitchell order on measures; we use this to define a hierarchy of strong axioms of infinity defined through normal filters, the α-weakly Erdős hierarchy. The filters in this hierarchy can be seen to be generated by sets of ordinals where these indiscernibility orders on structures dominate the canonical functions.• The limit axiom of this is that of greatly Erdős and we use it to calibrate (...) some strengthenings of the Chang property, one of which, CC+, is equiconsistent with a Ramsey cardinal, and implies that where K is the core model built with non-overlapping extenders — if it is rigid, and others which are a little weaker. As one corollary we have:TheoremIf then there is an inner model with a strong cardinal. • We define an α-Jónsson hierarchy to parallel the α-Ramsey hierarchy, and show that κ being α-Jónsson implies that it is α-Ramsey in the core model. (shrink)

Although features of the dentition figure prominently in discussions of early hominid phylogeny, remarkably little is known of the developmental basis of the variations in occlusal morphology and dental proportions that are observed among taxa. Recent experiments on tooth development in mice have identified some of the genes involved in dental patterning and the control of tooth specification. These findings provide valuable new insight into dental evolution and underscore the strong developmental links that exist among the teeth and the jaws (...) and cranium. The latter has important implications for cladistic studies that traditionally consider features of the skull independently from the dentition. BioEssays 23:481–493, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Three arguments are proposed against the idea that ordinary talk about the mind constitutes a folk psychology, a sort of prescientific theory which explains human behaviour and which is ripe for replacement by a neurological or computational theory with better scientific credentials. First, not all talk of the mind is introduced to explain in the way assumed by those who think that mental talk hypothesizes inner processes to explain behaviour. Second, the individuation of the behaviour which is explained by the (...) inner processes itself requires reference to ?mental? states such as intentions or desires. Consequently the project is circular. Finally, scientific theory is a practice with a history which may be matched in the case of ordinary talk of the mind. Certainly ordinary talk of motives, intentions, and thoughts may be infected by the theorizing of economists and sociologists et al., but it is impossible that all talk of the mind should be theoretical in this way. (shrink)

The idea of philosophy as a 'way of life' is not a new one. From the first recorded philosophy by Plato, there has been a tradition of thinking about philosophy as pointing us towards the good life, happiness and an ethical existence. But where does this notion that philosophy has anything to offer in terms of guiding us in how to live and live well come from? In this first ever introduction to philosophy as a way of life, Matthew (...) class='Hi'>Sharpe and Michael Ure take us us through the history of the idea from Plato and the Buddha to Foucault, Hadot and Zizek. They examine the kinds of practical exercises each thinker recommended and practiced to transform their philosophy into manners of living and acting. Philosophy as a Way of Life also examines the recent resurgence of thinking about philosophy as a practical, lived reality and why this ancient tradition still has so much relevance and power in the contemporary world. (shrink)

David Bohm is a physicist with a broad range of other interests including religion, philosophy, education, art, and linguistics. This book surveys Bohm's physical theories including the quantum potential theory and the implicate order or holomovement theory.

Preview: /Review: Emmanuel Faye, Arendt et Heidegger: Extermination nazie et destruction de la pensée, (Albin Michel, 2016), 560 pages./ The appearance of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1932-38) in 2014 has posed profound questions to philosophers and political theorists. For a long time, in ways that the Black Notebooks have definitively undermined, Heidegger’s National Socialism was widely considered as limited to 1933-34. His larger thought, at least after a proposed turning or kehre in the mid-1930s, was presented as insulated from, or (...) even critical of, Nazism and antisemitism. The work of Emmanuel Faye (led by Martin Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy), has been at the forefront of scholarship which has taken seriously the many questions raised by the ongoing publication of Heidegger’s Nazi-era materials, since the 1990s. On one hand, can great philosophy be implicated in forms of openly ethnonationalist, even exterminist political movements, or does it necessarily involve normative commitments which abhor anything like Nazism? On the other hand, how should we understand a political movement like National Socialism, including its ideological dimensions, such that it could appeal to a thinker of the magnitude of the one-time Fuhrer-Rektor of Freiburg University? Finally, what does publication of Heidegger’s Nazi texts and positions, culminating in the Black Notebooks, say about its limitations, political dimensions, and the postwar reception history of Heidegger in the liberal nations. (shrink)

This article challenges John M. Cooper’s reading of ancient Stoicism as a way of life, one which sets its back against Pierre Hadot’s notion that Stoicism could have philosophically advocated regimens of non-cognitive practices of the kind documented by Hadot. Part 1 examines Arrian’s Discourses, following A. A. Long in seeing in this text Arrian’s portrait of Epictetus as a philosophical persona: one bringing together the different virtues of Socrates, Diogenes, and Zeno. Part 2 then examines Epictetus’s Handbook , seeing (...) in this text—in contrast to Hadot and Sellars—a distinct set of prescriptions for the kinds of existential practices the Roman Stoics advocated, not in place of philosophical argumentation, but as a means to habituate aspirants’ conduct to ways of thinking, desiring and acting harmonious with their philosophical conclusions. (shrink)

The recent success of the Mars 2020 project and the high quality images relayed back to Earth have provided further impetus and expectations for human missions to Mars. To support space agency and private enterprise plans to establish a sustainable colony on Mars in the 2030s, synthetic biology may play a vital role to enable astronaut self-sufficiency. In this review, we describe some aspects of where synthetic biology may inform and guide in situ resource utilisation strategies. We address the nature (...) of Martian regolith and describe methods by which it may be rendered fit for purpose to support growth and yield of bioengineered crops. Lastly, we illustrate some examples of innate human adaptation which may confer characteristics desirable in the selection of colonists and with a future looking lens, offer potential targets for human enhancement. (shrink)

Following up on a 1989 paper on the subject, this essay revisits the question of ethical expertise in the court room. Informed by recent developments in the use of ethics experts, the authors argue 1) that the adversarial nature of court proceedings challenges the integrity of the ethicist's pedagogical role; 2) that the use of ethics experts as normative authorities remains dubious; 3) that clarification of the State's interest in “protecting the ethical integrity of the medical profession” is urgently required; (...) and 4) that the expertise of the ethicist may be more appropriately used in advising the legislature than in influencing the court. (shrink)

David Bohm's thinking has become widely publicized since the 1982 performance of a form of the Einstein‐Podolsky‐ Rosen (EPR) experiment. Bohm's holomovement theory, in particular, tries to explain the nonlocality that the experiment supports. Moreover, his theories are close to his metaphysical and religious thinking. Fritjof Capra's writings try something similar: supporting a theory (the bootstrap theory) because it is close to his religious beliefs. Both Bohm and Capra appear to use their religious ideas in their physics. Religion, their source (...) for physical hypotheses, provides the motivation to develop and uphold them. (shrink)

Research Ethics Boards (REBs) at universities are chaired and staffed by researchers who serve to enforce codes of ethics by scrutinizing research proposals. Yet there is widespread dissatisfaction with the REB approval process. This article examines the sources of that dissatisfaction, the place for codes of ethics in the conducting of research, the evidence for risk to research participants as the basis for those codes, and the effectiveness of REBs in protecting research participants. We offer suggestions for how REB chairs, (...) members, and researchers can improve the REB approval process so that it is fair and responsive. (shrink)

This paper examines the seemingly unlikely rapport between the ‘Christian existentialist’, radically Protestant thinker, Søren Kierkegaard and French classicist and historian of philosophy, Pierre Hadot, famous for advocating a return to the ancient pagan sense of philosophy as a way of life. Despite decisive differences we stress in our concluding remarks, we argue that the conception of philosophy in Hadot as a way of life shares decisive features with Kierkegaard’s understanding of the true ‘religious’ life: as something demanding existential engagement (...) from its proponent, as well as the learning or recitation of accepted doctrines. The mediating figure between the two authors, the paper agrees with Irina, is Socrates and his famous irony. In order to appreciate Kierkegaard’s rapport with Hadot, then we first of all consider Hadot’s treatment of the enigmatic ‘old wise man’ who remains central to Kierkegaard’s entire authorship. However, to highlight Hadot’s Socratic proximity to Kierkegaard, we set up Hadot’s Socrates against the contrasting portrait readers can find in John M. Cooper’s recent work on Socrates and philosophy as a way of life. Part II of the essay turns back from Hadot’s and Kierkegaard’s Socrates towards Hadot’s own work, and argues—again moving beyond both Gregor and Irina’s works on Hadot and Kierkegaard—that the shape of Hadot’s ‘authorship’, including his remarkably classical style, can be understood by way of Kierkegaard’s notion of indirect communication. In our concluding remarks, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, we pinpoint the fundamental difference between the two thinkers, arguing that for Hadot in contrast to Kierkegaard, a stress on existential commitment in no way speaks against the philosophical defence of a form of rational universalism. Reading Hadot via Kierkegaard allows us to appreciate Hadot’s novelty as attempting to ‘squaring the circle’ between an emphasis on subjectivity and, as it were, the subjective dimensions of philosophers’ pursuit of rational universality. (shrink)

Compatibilists respond to the problem of causal exclusion for nonreductive physicalism by rejecting the exclusionist’s ban on overdetermination. By the compatibilist’s lights there are two forms of overdetermination, one that’s problematic and another that is entirely benign. Furthermore, multiple causation by “tightly related” causes requires only the benign form of overdetermination. Call this the tight relation strategy for avoiding problematic forms of overdetermination. To justify the tight relation strategy, modal compatibilists appeal to a widely accepted counterfactual test. The argument of (...) this paper is that the counterfactual test fails to legitimize the tight relation strategy as it fails to adequately distinguish between problematic and benign overdetermination. Contrary to modal compatibilists, modal dependence does not suffice for benignity. I conclude by arguing that adequately addressing overdetermination worries requires a much heavier metaphysical burden than modal compatibilists have typically recognized. (shrink)

Music students at the University of Chichester Conservatoire completed questionnaires about their experience of the forced use of remote teaching and learning due to Lockdown, as imposed in the United Kingdom from March to June 2020, and how this impacted their self-beliefs, decision making processes, and methods of preparation for their performance assessments. Students had the choice to either have musical performance assessed in line with originally published deadlines via self-recorded video or defer the assessment until the following academic year. (...) Student’s choice to defer or submit the assessment during Lockdown was influenced by a range of forced factors, such as adaptions required by online teaching, limitations of rehearsal in their home environment, and the challenges in facilitating and recording their own assessments. Students completed online questionnaires about their self-efficacy, resilience, wellbeing, and provided free text responses explaining the reasoning for their decision to record their performance or to defer the assessment were coded to reveal patterns impacting their decision and preparation processes. Those choosing to submit their assessments demonstrated more strategies in their preparation and reported higher perceived self-efficacy scores. The specific conditions for this assessment, as a result of Lockdown, revealed correlations between resilience and both self-efficacy and wellbeing. The impact on teaching and the student experience is discussed and suggestions to support students in future settings of blended delivery are presented. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the state of the literature surrounding Heidegger and Nazism today. Part 1 focusses on Hassan Givsan’s remarkable work, Une histoire consternante: pourquoi les philosophes se laissent corrompre par le “cas Heidegger”, which looks at the different, mutually inconsistent forms of “apologetics” denying that Heidegger had been a Nazi, or that this commitment could have been shaped by his philosophy. Part 2 looks at five themes that emerge from the 2014 French-language collection Heidegger, le sol, la communauté, (...) la race, edited by Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger’s anti-semitism, before and in the Black Notebooks; Sein und Zeit and “the political”; Heidegger and his estate’s post-war “rewriting” of his Nazi-era texts; Heidegger’s esotericism; and his intellectual proximities to other Nazi thinkers. Closing reflections touch on the state of the debate, calling for increased scholarly awareness of the evidence, and debate of its significance. (shrink)

This paper wants to draw out a common argument in three great philosophers and littérateurs in modern French thought: Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, and Albert Camus. The argument makes metaphysical and theological scepticism the first premise for a universalistic political ethics, as per Voltaire's: “it is clearer still that we ought to be tolerant of one another, because we are all weak, inconsistent, liable to fickleness and error.” The argument, it seems to me, presents an interestingly overlooked, deeply important and (...) powerful contribution to the philosophical discourse of modernity. On one hand, theological and post-structuralist critics of “humanism” usually take the latter to depend either on an essentialist philosophical anthropology, or a progressive philosophy of history. The former, it is argued, is philosophically contestable and ethically contentious. The latter, for better or worse, is a continuation of theological eschatology by another name. So both, if not “modernity” per se, should somehow be rejected. But an ethical universalism – like that we find in Montaigne, Bayle, Voltaire, or Camus – which does not claim familiarity with metaphysical or eschatological truths, but humbly confesses our epistemic finitude, seeing in this the basis for ethical solidarity, eludes these charges. On the other hand, philosophical scepticism plays a large role in the post-structuralist criticisms of modern institutions and ideas in ways which have been widely taken to license forms of ethics which problematically identify responsibility, with taking a stand unjustifiable by recourse to universalizable reasons. But, in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus, our ignorance concerning the highest or final truths does not close off, but rather opens up, a new descriptive sensitivity to the foibles and complexities of human experience: a sensitivity reflected amply, and often hilariously, in their literary productions. As such, a critical agnosticism concerning claims about things “in the heavens and beneath the earth” does not, for such a “sceptical humanism,” necessitate decisionism or nihilism. Instead, it demands a redoubled ethical sensitivity to the complexities and plurality of political life which sees the dignity of “really-existing” others, whatever their metaphysical creeds, as an inalienable first datum of ethical conduct and reflection. After tracking these arguments in Montaigne, Voltaire, and Camus, the essay closes by reflecting on, and contesting, one more powerful theological argument against modern agnosticism's allegedly deleterious effects on ethical culture: that acknowledging ignorance concerning the highest things robs us of the basis for awe or wonder, the wellspring of human beings’ highest ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual achievements. (shrink)

In Part 1, we situate Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger in relation to the better known, broadly left-liberal approaches to interpreting Heidegger’s thought, stressing Dugin’s unusual focus on the German thinker’s “middle” or Nazi-era texts, and showing how this periodizing optic affects Dugin’s culminating reading of Sein und Zeit and its key axiological notion of authenticity (Part 1). Part 2 examines Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger’s radically pessimistic, trans-epochal critique of Western thought, centring around his striking reading of the esoteric notion of (...) the “fourfold” or Gewiert. In this account, the essence of reality itself, the “crosshairs” of the fourfold, is provocatively depicted by Dugin as war, Polemos, Kampf, or Krieg, following the Heidegger of 1933–1936. In a move which echoes Heidegger’s own post-1938 relativizations of all distinctions between Nazism, liberalism and socialism – as well as the Shoah and mechanized agriculture – the Russian thinker hence ends by obviating any distinctions between liberal or democratic and totalitarian regimes, war and peace, and genocide and consumerism. All must be overcome in the “another beginning” destined for the new Russia, if it has the ears to hear. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper is a critical response to Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonising the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. We take up her book’s call for a “problematizing” history which challenges “taken-for-granted” preconceptions in order to contest Allen’s own representation of the thought of the enlightenment. Allen accepts that all the enlighteners agreed upon a stadial, progressive account of history, which she critiques epistemically and normatively. But we show in Part 2, drawing on the work of Henri Vyverberg and (...) other historians of eighteenth century ideas, that a cyclical, rise and fall account of historical succession was more prominent than the progressive narrative in leading enlighteners such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Condillac, Jancourt, Grimm, and Raynal, all of whom Allen does not mention. In Part 3, we show that not all thinkers of the enlightenment were pro-colonial or pro-imperialist, as Allen also presupposes in The End of Progress. By examining Abbé Raynal’s History of The Two Indies in Part 3, and notably its Diderotian interpolations, we show that many enlighteners propounded fierce criticisms of European colonialism and the slave trade, even calling directly for armed resistance against European infractions. In critical theorists’ search for chastened normative foundations, our concluding remarks contend, there is a need to develop more accurate, balanced, post-postmodern reckonings of the enlightenment. (shrink)

This essay is a critique of Derrida's ethical works, using Camus's last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida's: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting passer-by as a young woman suicides one night on (...) the Seine. After this time, he comes to consider all his former virtues as concealed vices. He also becomes acutely aware of what he terms the 'duplicity' of human beings as such. In Part I, I consider how Clamence's fall from innocence can be read 'with' Derrida's deconstructive registration of a 'double bind' pertaining to our standing vis-á-vis what he terms 'logocentrism'. I argue that Derrida's is a post-lapsarian philosophy, which challenges all attempts to construct closed conceptual systems that would confer an epistemic and/or moral certitude upon their expositors. In Part II, I then enter into a more detailed exposition of Derrida's 'later' works broaching friendship, the invitation, the gift, and other 'matters moral'. I read these texts in the light of an examination of what is involved, for Camus, in being a 'judge-penitent' (what Clamence in The Fall calls his profession). I suggest that Derrida runs the risk of a certain 'puritanism of difference' in his moral reflections, which defend the aporetic formulation: 'tout autre est tout autre' [every other is every bit other] (The Gift of Death). The problem is that, while Derrida's position allows one (everywhere) to say what one is against, it problematizes any affirmative moral stance. Like Clamence, who assumes the right to judge everyone else because he has subjected himself to a severe penitence, I suggest that we have a right to wonder whether Derrida's deconstructive critique of metaphysics can validate only endless repetitions of itself. Key Words: Camus • Derrida • ethics • The Fall • innocence • 'puritanism of difference. (shrink)

Edmund Pellegrino has argued that the dramatic changes in American health care call for critical reflection on the traditional norms governing the therapeutic relationship. This paper offers such reflection on the obligation to do no harm. Drawing on work by Beauchamp and Childress and Pellegrino and Thomasma, I argue that the libertarian model of medical ethics offered by Engelhardt cannot adequately sustain an obligation to do no harm. Because the obligation to do no harm is not based simply on a (...) negative duty of nonmaleficence but also on a positive duty of beneficence, I argue that it is best understood to derive from the fiduciary nature of the healing relationship. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the complex ethical dynamics of violence and nonviolence in Mahāyāna Buddhism by considering some of the historical precedents and scriptural prescriptions that inform modern and contemporary Buddhist acts of self-immolation. Through considering these scripturally sanctioned Mahāyāna ‘case studies,’ the paper traces the tension that exists in Buddhist thought between violence and nonviolence, outlines the interplay of key Mahāyāna ideas of transcendence and altruism, and comments on the mimetic status and influence of spiritually charged texts. It (...) is the contention of this paper that violent scriptural metaphors can create paradigms of enactment that are paradoxically illustrative of the core ‘non-violent’ Mahāyāna virtues of compassion, giving, patience, and vigor. The discussion will show that these virtues are underpinned by the Mahāyāna philosophical mainstays of non-duality, bodhisattvic transcendent altruism, skillful means, and dependent co-origination. (shrink)

The cause of Paget's disease is still unknown, despite many years of intensive study. During this time, evidence has sporadically emerged to suggest that the disease may result from a slow viral infection by one or more of the Paramyxoviruses. More recently, epidemiologic and molecular studies have suggested that the canine paramyxovirus, canine distemper virus, is the virus responsible for the disease. If true, then along with rabies, this would be a further example of a canine virus causing human disease. (...) Studies in the natural host have now supported these findings. Further investigations have proposed that the bony abnormalities seen in Paget's disease are due to the effects of the virus on osteoclastic interleukin‐6 and c‐FOS production, possibly via the transcription factor NF‐kB. (shrink)