This article deals with the question of which kinds of deceptions vitiate consent to sexual relations. More specifically, it addresses the question of which characteristics of the perpetrator (e.g. their identity, wealth, or marital status), of their relations with the victim (e.g. marriage, long-term intentions), or of the sexual act itself (e.g. protected) vitiate consent when deception is involved. In this proposal, we offer our view on how this question should be answered: the criminalisation of deceptive sex should be cautiously (...) extended to include deception regarding any characteristic of the deceiver or the relationship on which the deceived’s consent was conditional, where the deceiver was aware of this conditionality. To support our proposal, we examine the different definitions of “deceptive sex” and diverse legal approaches taken to its criminalisation in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Israel, and discuss their respective merits and shortcomings. Surprisingly, different jurisdictions take strikingly different stances on these matters. This diversity ranges from the narrow definition of traditional English law (and its more opaque contemporary version in England, Canada, and Israel) to the minimalist approach of the German system. To counter the risk of over-criminalisation inherent in our proposal, we also propose using an offence lighter than rape and criminalising only those deceivers who actively lied and whose actual knowledge of the victim’s hypothetical refusal can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Overall, while our proposal would cautiously extend the criminalisation of deceptive sex to some types of cases that are currently not criminalised, it would also significantly limit the criminalisation of deceptive sex by enhancing the requirements regarding both the accused’s actus reus and their mens rea. (shrink)

[1] Bereshit, Shemot Ṿa-yiḳra -- [2] Ba-Midbar, Devarim, Mo'adim, 'Inyanim shonim.

Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, originally published in 1980, gives an account of "altruistic emotions" and friendship that brings out their moral value. Blum argues that moral theories centered on rationality, universal principle, obligation, and impersonality cannot capture this moral importance. This was one of the first books in contemporary moral philosophy to emphasize the moral significance of emotions, to deal with friendship as a moral phenomenon, and to challenge the rationalism of standard interpretations of Kant, although Blum’s "sentimentalism" (...) owes more to Schopenhauer than to Hume. It was a forerunner to care ethics, and feminist ethics more generally; to virtue ethics; and to subsequent influential interpretations of Kant that attempted to room for altruistic emotion and friendship, and other forms of particularism and partialism. In addition, the work has been widely influential in religious studies, political theory, bioethics, and feminist ethics. (shrink)

Most contemporary moral philosophy is concerned with issues of rationality, universality, impartiality, and principle. By contrast Laurence Blum is concerned with the psychology of moral agency. The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. Blum takes up the challenge of Iris Murdoch to articulate a vision of moral excellence that provides a worthy aspiration for human beings. (...) Drawing on accounts of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust Blum argues that impartial principle can mislead us about the variety of forms of moral excellence. (shrink)

This edition and annotated translation of al-Qāsim's Kitāb al-mustarshid includes a discussion of anthropomorphism and interpretation of the Qur’ān in the theology of the Zaidite imam al-Qāsim ibn Ibrāhīm . Al-Qāsim's methods of interpretation are put forth and analyzed in light of early Qur’ānic exegesis.

This book demonstrates that ancient Christian Gnosticism was an ancient form of cultural criticism in a mythological garb. It establishes that, much like modern forms of critical theory, ancient Gnosticism was set on deconstructing mainstream discourses and cultural premises. Strains of critical theory dealt with include the Frankfurt School, queer theory, and poststructural philosophy. The book documents how in both ancient Gnosticism and modern critical theories issues that used to serve as premises for discussion or as concepts relegated to the (...) realms of the “natural” and the “given” in their respective historical contexts, are transformed into objects of contention. The main aim of this book is to salvage the historical category of Gnosticism from its present scholarly disavowal, if only because Gnosticism, when read as a cultural, and not only a religious phenomenon, presents us an ancient form of culture criticism which would be hard to parallel until (post) modernity. While Hans Jonas remarked many years ago that “something in Gnosticism knocks at the door of our Being and of our twentieth-century Being in particular,” by the 21st century global world this something has already entered and lives with us. We can thus still benefit from another perspective, even if it comes from Mediterranean people who lived almost 2,000 years ago. (shrink)

The arguments in favor of the Principle of Indifference fail to explain its fruitfulness in science. Using the recent metaphysical concept of Grounding, I devise an explanation that can justify a weak version of the principle and discuss an instance of its application in Quantum mechanics.

Rosemary Hennessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of DiscourseRichard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish QuestionDavid Ames Curtis, The Castoriadis ReaderDavid Ames Curtis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the ImaginationMorris Kaplan, Sexual Justice: Democratic Citizenship and the Politics of Desire.

The years since the world-wide demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 have seen a significant embrace of antiracist education as part of moral education, followed by conservative rollback of such efforts. The article discusses both, and is applicable to the further retrenchment in the second Trump administration (in 2025). Antiracist moral and civic education should educate about both interpersonal racism (racism of individuals toward other individuals) and institutional racism (systemic racial injustices). Each of those areas involves (...) both “negative” values—avoiding racial wrongs—and “positive” values—promoting race-related goods. Negative interpersonal values include stereotyping, antipathy, and demeaning the other. Positive interpersonal values include respecting racial others as equals, recognizing positive racial differences, respecting cultures associated with racial groups. Negative institutional values are the most familiar—ending, mitigating, repairing systemic racial injustices. Positive institutional values include promoting racial justice, understanding, harmony, and a culture of respect throughout society represented in its institutions. Institutional racism requires civic education, in order to recognize patterns of injustice, to analyze their causes, and to be able to measure them against both morally sound and nationally salient ideals (such as equality, liberty, and justice). Antiracist education must be sensitive to students’ particular racial identities, and to asymmetries between the way white and non-white identities function morally and civicly. -/- Although sometimes it is important to ignore someone’s racial identity in interacting with them, “color-blindness,” promoted as an overarching principle by the Trump administration and the retrenchment legislation, cannot play that role. Antiracist education requires that we often take account of people’s race, and the issue is how to do that properly, not to ignore it entirely. (shrink)

The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. They examine moral exemplars and the "moral saints" debate, the morality of rescue during the Holocaust, role morality as lying between "personal" and "impersonal" perspectives, Carol Gilligan's theory of women and morality, Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and moral responsiveness in young children.

In Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism Paul Richard Blum shows that Aristotle’s thought remained the touchstone of modern philosophy; for it was the philosophy taught at universities. The concept of philosophy at Jesuit schools forms the first part of this book. Their impact on the sciences and mathematics in combination with Renaissance ideas of nature is the topic of the second part. The transformation of Aristotelian metaphysics and theology under the influence of the Renaissance is the third area of (...) this book. Surprising continuity from the late Middle Ages into modernity and the radical difference of subject centered modern philosophy from ‘teachable’ school philosophy are innovative in these studies. (shrink)

An analysis of the collective engagement with the disease known as Alzheimer’s and the dementia reputed of it reveals recourse to a socially standardized formula that attributes causal agency to the brain in the absence of clinching knowledge. I propose that what Baudrillard calls the model of molecular idealism stipulates such a neurological view of determinism in order to provide caregivers with reassurance in the face of the perplexing character of dementia and the depressing reactions to mortality that it brings (...) to the surface. (shrink)

Observers have noted a decline (in the US) in attributions of genetically-based inferiority (e.g. in intelligence) to Blacks, and a rise in attributions of culturally-based inferiority. Is this "culturalism" merely warmed-over racism ("cultural racism") or a genuinely distinct way of thinking about racial groups? The question raises a larger one about the relative place of biology and culture in racist thought. I develop a typology of culturalisms as applied to race: (1) inherentist or essentialist culturalism (inferiorizing cultural characteristics wrongly but (...) intelligibly regarded as inhering in the nature of racial groups). This view has an historical pedigree in the work of J.G. von Herder, and the tradition of "national racism." (2) non-inherentist culturalism (groups regarded as possessing changeable, malleable inferiorizing cultural characteristics). (3) colonalist culturalism (colonial subjects regarded as uncivilized but capable of becoming civilized under European tutelage). (4) neo-racism (cultures of former colonial subjects in or potentially immigrating to European countries are regarded in an inherentist manner and incompatible with but not inferior to European cultures). Non-inherentist culturalism (#2) can be put to either a racist or an anti-racist use. (shrink)

Alisdair Macintyre's defense of the tradition of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas offers a way to answer the question "What is the good of history?" By his use of dialectical reasoning in defense of the Thomist tradition, Macintyre helps Catholic historians to see that the good of history comes from its being a handmaiden to tradition. The writings of St. Bede the Venerable and John Henry Cardinal Newman are used as examples of how Catholic historians can know and draw upon (...) their own tradition. (shrink)

I argue that Samantha Vice understates the moral resources white people have available to them to minimize their falling into distorted ways of perceiving and responding to the world caused by bare white advantage. In doing so, she paints an unjustifiably pessimistic picture of white civic involvement in South Africa, and anywhere where white people are unjustly advantaged, such as the United States. I delineate two similar but distinct antiracist moral identities the 'white ally' and the 'person committed to racial (...) justice'-that can guide civic engagement, as well as provide a counterweight to the distortions of whiteness. I argue that Vice's recommendation of withdrawal from public engagement in humble silence is not the most morally appropriate response to white privilege. (shrink)

Stereotypes are false or misleading generalizations about groups, generally widely shared in a society, and held in a manner resistant, but not totally, to counterevidence. Stereotypes shape the stereotyper’s perception of stereotyped groups, seeing the stereotypic characteristics when they are not present, and generally homogenizing the group. The association between the group and the given characteristic involved in a stereotype often involves a cognitive investment weaker than that of belief. The cognitive distortions involved in stereotyping lead to various forms of (...) moral distortion, to which moral philosophers have paid insufficient attention. Some of these are common to all stereotypes—failing to see members of the stereotyped groups as individuals, moral distancing, failing to see subgroup diversity within the group. Other moral distortions vary with the stereotype. Some attribute a much more damaging or stigmatizing characteristic (e.g. being violent) than others (e.g. being good at basketball). But the characteristic in question must also be viewed in its wider historical and social context to appreciate its overall negative and positive dimensions. (shrink)

The dispute about the role of class in understanding the life situations of people of color has tended to be overpolarized, between a class reductionism and an “it's only race” position. Class processes shape racial groups’ life situations. Race and class are also distinct axes of injustice; but class injustice informs racial injustice. Some aspects of racial injustice can be expressed only in concepts associated with class (e.g., material deprivation, inferior education). But other aspects of racial injustice or other harms, (...) such as racial discrimination or stigma, are not reducible to class concepts and cannot be fully addressed through class-focused policies. Overall, any attempt to fully secure racial justice for a racial group will require a combination of race-focused and class-focused policies. Anti-racist outlooks often neglect or downplay either the normative or the explanatory significance of class, or both—for example, by overlooking or downplaying the dignitary harms of class and the material harms of race; missing the historical dimension of class injustice; masking class by a narrowing of the complex normative structure of racial disparities; or not recognizing that a class-focused initiative (like raising the minimum wage) can address substantial racial justice concerns, even though not all of them. “Systemic racism” terminology recognizes class explanatorily but suppresses it normatively. Charles Mills's influential notion of “white supremacy,” while a powerful tool for conceptualizing and illuminating racial injustice, can also contribute to minimizing or masking the justice-related impact of class, as do some of Mills's specific discussions of class in various writings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 121-122 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone, editors. Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xii + 270. Cloth, $75.00 Early-modern philosophy begins in the seventeenth century. This book, based on a colloquium at the Warburg Institute, London in 1997, strives at extending the limits of (...) this period into the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries. Thus "the long-standing exclusion of the Renaissance from the standard philosophical curriculum" (xii) should come to an end by acknowledging its being an integral part of early modern philosophy and its relevance for an understanding of modern thought. The distinctive element of the Renaissance was, according to the editors, humanism, understood as the revival of ancient sources from the fourteenth century on, and its impact on the shaping of modern thought by these sources.One can identify the following types of argument offered in the twelve contributions to this book: (1) Renaissance humanists mediated classical sources into the seventeenth and following centuries either by translating Greek texts into Latin (Lohr on Aristotle commentaries) or by offering new interpretations that were to become standard (Hankins on Ficino and Galileo, and Mercer on the German Platonists). (2) Ancient modes of thought, mediated through the Renaissance, shaped modern philosophy (Stone on Aristotelian and Reformed ethics, Levi on Stoicism in Justus Lipsius, Kraye on Marcus Aurelius editions, and Osler on Gassendi and Aristotle). (3) Humanist literary forms and mentalities survived in modern thought (Bianchi on dialogue, Vickers on rhetoric in Bacon, and James on 'grandeur' and scientific argument).Two papers do not fit into this scheme: in "The Theology of Lorenzo Valla," the only paper dealing directly with a Renaissance humanist, Monfasani wants to prove that "Valla was no theologian." Monfasani does this on the basis of a very narrow concept of dogmatic correctness, blaming Valla continuously for being banal, to the effect that the paper does not contribute to the topic of the book. One could well connect Valla's theological issues (free will, summum bonum, trinity, etc.) with his provocative stirring up of philosophy in general and show his influence on Protestant theology and on modern ethics.The other paper is by J. R. Milton, which is enlightening because it summarizes the prejudices against humanism in modern philosophy ("'Delicate learning,' erudition and the enterprise of philosophy"). He endorses "one of the most familiar narratives in European philosophy" (161), namely that Descartes's breakthrough was due to his total rupture [End Page 121] with the philosophical tradition, especially with contemporary humanist and scholastic thought. Thus Descartes's triumph was that of the myth of the irrelevance of history to philosophy as evident in Galileo, Locke, and even Hume. If antecedents are acknowledged, e.g., in Berkeley, then accepting that they "provide us either with an irreplaceable source of wisdom or with equally irreplaceable models for imitation, or indeed both" (167), still fails to recognize that the history of a philosophical problem is a part of that problem rather than just some general "wisdom" or a model for imitation. Of course, Milton repeats the myth of Bacon's anti-humanism, masterly refuted in this very book by Brian Vickers, and Milton believes that Valla "enthroned" "custom and example" and therefore for him "it would be difficult if not impossible to state Hempel's Raven Paradox" (169). One might wonder whether the conclusion: "All ravens are black --all non-black things are non-ravens," is the paramount of modern philosophy. But a thorough reader of Valla's logic might discover similarities to pragmatism, which are fostered by his deep criticism of language with the tools of Renaissance humanism. However, Descartes's indebtedness to Renaissance method and rhetoric is handbook knowledge today.The audience for this collection of samples are specialists either in seventeenth- or eighteenth-century philosophy, or in Renaissance thought, or even philosophers in the narrow sense of the disciplines. The latter are difficult to convince of the usefulness of historic studies or "erudite activity" (Milton... (shrink)

Giordano Bruno Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher of the later Renaissance whose writings encompassed the ongoing traditions, intentions, and achievements of his times and transmitted them into early modernity. Taking up the medieval practice of the art of memory and of formal logic, he focused on the creativity of the human mind. Bruno … Continue reading Giordano Bruno →.

Charles Mills began his career as a Marxist but at a particular point shifted to a focus on race, deliberately leaving behind an explicit concern with class, though implying that both class and race (along with gender) constitute distinct, interacting, domination systems in society. I argue that Mills’s permanent contribution to political theory is to see white supremacy as a sociopolitical order with its own character and logic, but that his specific account of race and white supremacy is faulty because (...) class processes are internal to the racial domination system, and “racial injustice” already incorporates some aspects of class injustice. Thus Mills fails to recognize that white supremacy can fail to benefit and indeed can positively harm some white people. More generally, he fails to theorize class as a pervasive domination system. This argument does not reduce race to class, as Mills was correct in criticizing Marxism for (sometimes) doing. Some aspects of race do not concern class, while others do. Mills also fails to consistently articulate the specific normative character of current racial injustice, misleadingly conflating it with the “subperson” view of Black people dominant in the earlier colonial, slavery, and Segregation periods of white supremacy. For example, people of color now are accorded (if sometimes imperfectly) a panoply of rights denied in those earlier periods, and for Mills denial of rights is a core criterion of subpersonhood. The current period, better characterized by the idea of “racial disrespect” than “subpersonhood,” involves a form of wrongfulness much more similar in character to contemporary class injustice than the sub-personhood period did. -/- Mills thus gives a misleading picture of the severity of class injustice in relation to racial injustice; they are much more similar than he says. And he also fails to recognize that racial injustice also incorporates forms of class injustice. (shrink)

Among race scholars, there is a general consensus that (1) groups thought to be races in the 19th/20th century do not possess the characteristics attributed to them in classic racial ideology, (2) such groups are nevertheless intergenerational collectivities with distinctive social and historical experiences, and (3) those experiences were and are deeply shaped by the false beliefs of classic racial ideology. The groups of whom this consensus is true are felicitously called “racialized groups,” terminology preferable to “social construction,” “classic racial (...) groups,” “ethnic groups,” and “ancestral/descent groups,” though each of these has something to be said for it. The socio-historical consensus is not, however, adequately reflected in recent work on race, for example, by Appiah (who confuses race and racialization), Mallon (who does not capture the “group-ness” of racialized groups), and Glasgow (who does not capture the way the false ideology of race has shaped the experience of racialized groups). (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

The concept of action-research has been developed during the last decade, mainly at the Research Center for Group Dynamics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and at the Commission for Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress—centers founded by the late Kurt Lewin whose original and creative mind has made many contributions to social-psychological and sociological research. I owe my acquaintance with this new approach to the Research Center, particularly to Ronald Lippitt and Alvin Zander. Yet most of the following observations (...) are based on my research experience during the last four years. The responsibility for what I am saying is, therefore, completely my own. (shrink)

This edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “De ente et uno” (“On being and the one”) offers for the first time a key text for the reformation of metaphysics in Renaissance philosophy in German translation. The Latin text is added. The detailed introduction and careful commentary reveal the guiding points Pico has set with this work.

In 1949, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manchester organized a symposium “Mind and Machine” with Michael Polanyi, the mathematicians Alan Turing and Max Newman, the neurologists Geoff rey Jeff erson and J. Z. Young, and others as participants. Th is event is known among Turing scholars, because it laid the seed for Turing’s famous paper on “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, but it is scarcely documented. Here, the transcript of this event, together with Polanyi’s original statement and his (...) notes taken at a lecture by Jeff erson, are edited and commented for the fi rst time. Th e originals are in the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago. Th e introduction highlights elements of the debate that included neurophysiology, mathematics, the mind-body-machine problem, and consciousness and shows that Turing’s approach, as documented here, does not lend itself to reductionism. (shrink)