Offers an analysis of three strongly contrasting primitive civilizations, showing how behavior is influenced by custom and tradition.

Before presenting his own account of value in the Ethics, Spinoza spends much of EIAppendix and EIVPreface attempting to refute a series of axiological ‘prejudices’ that he takes to have taken root in the minds of his readership. In doing so, Spinoza adopts what might be termed a ‘genealogical’ argumentative strategy. That is, he tries to establish the falsity of imagined readership’s prejudices about good and bad, perfection and imperfection, by first showing that the ideas from which they have arisen (...) are themselves false. Many elements of this genealogy, however, remain unclear. First, both the nature of the metaethical prejudices Spinoza believes we have been labouring under, and the metaphysical prejudices that he takes to have given rise to them, continue to attract widespread disagreement. Although much less commented on, it is also not entirely obvious why Spinoza takes the one to have engendered the other. In this article, I attempt to clarify Spinoza’s reasoning in both of these respects, ultimately concluding that Spinoza offers us two accounts of how this process has occurred, the first beginning from an anthropocentric doctrine of divine providence, the second from more secular, perhaps more purely Aristotelian metaphysical tradition. (shrink)

Short overview of the From Small Beginnings Project and its relevance for resisting eugenics in contemporary society.

La question du caractère opératoire du « territoire » se pose avec acuité en situation transfrontalière. Plusieurs formules institutionnelles et théoriques ont été explorées dans le cas du territoire franco-belge Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai, à l’urbanisation dense et polycentrique, pratiquée historiquement comme région de transit. D’abord, l’Eurométropole, premier Groupement européen de coopération transfrontalière, qui n’a finalement pas abouti à une vision intégrée. Ensuite, une réflexion sur la bio-région unifiée autour d’une vallée, d’une plaine ou d’un bassin permettant de transcender des limites administratives arbitraires. (...) Enfin, le modèle de la « ville horizontale », qui s’est concrétisé par le projet de Parc bleu autour des structures hydrographiques et une urbanisation continue qui s’étend de la Belgique à la Ruhr et la Randstad. L’enjeu est de vivre dans des systèmes territoriaux qui rassemblent, avec multiplicités et interdépendances. (shrink)

Review of Essays on Spinoza's Ethical Theory edited by MJ Kisner and A Youpa.

Moral revolutions are rightly coming to be recognised as a philosophically interesting and historically important mode of moral change. What is less often acknowledged is that the very characteristics that make a moral change revolutionary pose a fundamental challenge to the possibility of moral progress. This is because moral revolutions are characterised by a diachronic form of deep moral disagreement: moral agents on either side of a moral revolution adopt different standards for assessing the merits of a moral argument, and (...) according to the standards they adopt, agents on neither side of the revolution ought to accept the arguments being put forward by those on the other. This threatens to undermine the progressive status of many of our most celebrated historical examples of moral revolutions: if a moral revolution only looks progressive in light of a change in evaluative standards it itself brought about, then moral progress seems relative to a particular historical perspective; if prior to a moral revolution taking place the moral arguments in its favour fall short of the relevant standards, moral revolutions can never be the outcome of rational argumentation. This apparent relativism and irrationality sits uncomfortably alongside our common-sense intuition that the moral revolutions upon which our contemporary moral worldview rests count as genuine moral progress. In this paper, I deepen currently popular Kuhnian-inspired accounts of moral revolution by incorporating Wittgensteinian ideas from _Philosophical Investigations_ and _On Certainty_. The result is an original way of thinking about deep moral disagreements, moral revolutions, and moral progress. (shrink)

Jeff Benedict has seen both good and bad in his career as a journalist. Some of the best are the extraordinary people he has met who have made deliberate choices to live happier lives despite the extreme hardship that each of them have faced. Although life will knock us down from time to time, this book is an important reminder that we all can make a choice to get back up, brush ourselves off, and keep pressing forward. Replace anger with (...) forgiveness through studying the real-life examples of seven inspiring mentors. Avoid discouragement by purposefully recognizing God's hand in your life. Diminish the heartache from tragedy through the concentrated act of serving others. Gain insights from parents who were deliberate in safeguarding their children against harmful influences. Stand strong through life's adversity through the examples of powerful prayer. (shrink)

Knowledge of what it’s like to have perceptual experiences, e.g. of what it’s like to see red or taste Turkish coffee, is phenomenal knowledge; and it is knowledge the substantial or significant nature of which is widely assumed to pose a challenge for physicalism. Call this the New Challenge to physicalism. The goal of this paper is to take a closer look at the New Challenge. I show, first, that it is surprisingly difficult to spell out clearly and neutrally what (...) the New Challenge is in fact urging the physicalist to explain. What initially look like plausible or promising ways of making sense of it turn out to be either question begging or insufficient to generate a challenge to physicalism at all. I go on to suggest that what the New Challenge may be asking the physicalist to explain may be the fact that we come to token certain higher-order judgments about the significance of phenomenal knowledge. I end with a discussion of the implications of this interpretation of the New Challenge—which turns out to be as much a challenge for the anti-physicalist as it is for the physicalist. (shrink)

Convenons, à la suite de Rastier (2001) notamment, que les textes sont l’objet de la linguistique. Un texte est entendu ici comme « une suite linguistique empirique attestée, produite dans une pratique sociale déterminée, et fixée sur un support quelconque » (Rastier, 2001 : 21), ce qui intègre pleinement diverses formes d’expression (orales comme écrites). Le corpus de textes est alors le terrain privilégié de l’observation de la langue. Lors de la collecte des données, lors de leur enregist...

This article considers the role of disembodiment in the visual art and films of David Lynch. This line of inquiry, I argue, allows us to consider the ways scholars do and do not conceptualise the relationship between Lynch’s works of different mediums. Specifically, I pursue the conviction that Lynch’s preoccupation with an injured or fragmented body corresponds to his intermedial creative practice. I turn my attention to Lynch’s early short film The Alphabet (1968) which exemplifies how the violence inflicted on (...) the body represents the violence wreaked by the separation of art into different media. Using Jacques Rancière’s definition of mediality and his idea of the sensorium, I offer a new perspective on the questions of disembodiment that manifest in tricky and unpredictable bodies in Lynch’s work and thus on how we should read Lynch’s output as joined up across mediums. 1. (shrink)

Background: The phenomenon of forceful physical restraint in pediatric care is an ethical issue because it confronts professionals with the dilemma of using force for the child’s best interest. This is a paradox. The perspective of healthcare professional working in pediatric wards needs further in-depth investigations. Purpose: To explore the perspectives and behaviors of healthcare professionals toward forceful physical restraint in pediatric care. Methods: This qualitative ethnographic study used focus groups with purposeful sampling. Thirty volunteer healthcare professionals (nurses, hospital aids, (...) physiotherapists, and health educators) were recruited in five pediatric facilities in four hospitals around Paris, France, from March to June 2013. The data were processed using NVIVO software (QSR International Ltd. 1999–2013). The data analysis followed a qualitative methodological process. Ethical Considerations: The research was conducted in compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Written informed consent was collected systematically from participants. Findings: This study provides elements to help understand why restraint remains common despite its contradiction with the duty to protect the child and the child’s rights. All participants considered the use of forceful physical restraint to be a frequent difficulty in pediatrics. Greater interest in the child’s health was systematically used to justify the use of force, with little consideration for contradictory or ethical aspects. Raising the issue of forceful restraint always triggered discomfort, unease and an outpour of emotions among healthcare professionals. The findings have highlighted a form of hierarchy of duties that give priority to the execution of the technical procedure and legitimize the use of restraint. Professionals seemed to temporarily suspend their ability to empathize in order to apply restraint to carry out a technical procedure. This observation has allowed us to suggest the concept of “transient empathic blindness.” Conclusion: Using physical restraint during pediatric care was considered a common problem by participants. This practice must be questioned, and professionals must have access to training to find alternatives to strong restraint. Conceptualizing this phenomenon with the concept of “transient empathic blindness” could help professionals understand what happens in their minds when using forceful restraint. (shrink)

The decades following the Second Vatican Council witnessed Catholic theology's break from classicism. Deductive, classical theology was replaced by an empirical, historically minded theology. The result was moral confusion and intellectual controversy whose effects are still felt by the Church. Benedict Ashely agreed that some revision in moral theology was necessary after Vatican II to formulate and integrate the mysteries of the Catholic faith. The question was how such teachings could be reformulated while preserving their substantive content. Ashley presents a (...) method of theological reflection that challenges the subjectivity, relationality, and language of historical mindedness with a tradition focusing on Scripture, the Magisterium, sound natural science, and a considered relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. This volume also contains commentary by four distinguished scholars: Matthew McWhorter provides an intellectual biography of Ashley, examining the development of this thought before and after Vatican II. Rev. Cajetan Cuddy, OP, reviews Ashley's philosophical theology in its principles, especially as grounded in natural law philosophy. Matthew Minerd assesses Ashley's approach to the authority of the Catholic Magisterium, the papacy, and the formation of conscience. Rev. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, OP, evaluates Ashley's application of his moral theology to beginning- and end-of-life decision-making. (shrink)

Western Self-Contempt travels through civilizations since antiquity, examining major political events and the literature of ancient Greece, Rome, France, Britain, and the United States, to study evidence of cultural self-hatred and its cyclical recurrence. Benedict Beckeld explores oikophobia, described by its coiner Sir Roger Scruton as "the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours,'" in its political and philosophical applications. Beckeld analyzes the theories behind oikophobia along with their historical sources, revealing why oikophobia is (...) best described as a cultural malaise that befalls civilizations during their declining days. Beckeld gives a framework for why today's society is so fragmented and self-critical. He demonstrates that oikophobia is the antithesis of xenophobia. By this definition, the riots and civil unrest in the summer of 2020 were an expression of oikophobia. Excessive political correctness that attacks tradition and history is an expression of oikophobia. Beckeld argues that if we are to understand these behaviors and attitudes, we must understand oikophobia as a sociohistorical phenomenon. Western Self-Contempt is a systematic analysis of oikophobia, combining political philosophy and history to examine how Western civilizations and cultures evolve from naïve and self-promoting beginnings to states of self-loathing and decline. Concluding with a philosophical portrait of an increasingly interconnected Western civilization, Beckeld reveals how past events and ideologies, both in the US and in Europe, have led to a modern culture of self-questioning and self-rejection. (shrink)

This article concerns the nature and limits of individuals’ rights to privacy over information that they have made public. For some, even suggesting that an individual can have a right to privacy over such information may seem paradoxical. First, one has no right to privacy over information that was never private to begin with. Second, insofar as one makes once-private information public – whether intentionally or unintentionally – one waives one’s right to privacy to that information. In this article, however, (...) we suggest the moral situation is more complicated than this. Rather, we argue that there is a class of public information – namely, once-private information that individuals have made public unintentionally – which remains within the scope of an individuals’ right to privacy, even when it has passed into the public domain. Significantly, this class includes any information rights-holders were unaware could be inferred from information they have made public and which they would not otherwise have wanted to be in the public domain. As we show, as well as clarifying several everyday dilemmas with regards to individuals’ privacy rights, this finding has elucidates a number of problems in the ethics of Big Data. (shrink)

With the use of Bruner’s concept of story, broad generalizations from the US, and political philosophy, this article suggests that comparisons between music programs throughout the world are meaningless unless we acknowledge how pervasive, insidious, and menacing is the rhetoric of the global market economy. Political philosophy is one process of inquiry that can provide a way of reflecting upon educative constructs that affect all educators. One way to begin thinking about the process of comparison is to examine educational statements (...) from government websites throughout the world. While in many cases these statements are not referred to as manifestos, the rhetoric in use on these government sanctioned websites not only boldly states the goal of education in terms of global markets and competition but also does so by co-opting discourse that was originally intended to speak for oppressed populations. (shrink)

Comment une école publique d’art en Grande Bretagne a-t-elle été créée, comment a-t-elle évolué au XIXe siècle et quelle fut sa place vis-à-vis de la Royal Academy of Arts? Quelles furent l’incidence et l’importance de l’économie politique utilitariste et plus particulièrement des écrits de J. Bentham sur le goût, l’éthique et l’utilité, dans le développement d’une institution subventionnée par l’État et destinée à l’éducation artistique de la nation? Quels furent les débats et les apories..

ABSTRACTEvaluative conditioning is a change in the liking of a stimulus due to its previous pairings with another stimulus. In three...

This book provides much new thinking on the phenomenon of whole person education, a phenomenon which features strongly in East Asian universities, and which aims to develop students intellectually, spiritually, and ethically, to master critical thinking skills, to explore ethical challenges in the surrounding community and to acquire a broad based foundation of knowledge in humanities, society and nature. The book considers different approaches to whole person education, including Confucian, Buddhist, and Chinese perspectives, Western philosophy and religion and interdisciplinary approaches. (...) Overall, the book provides a comprehensive overview of whole person education, why it matters and how to implement it. Moreover, although the examples in the book are from East Asia, the discussion and the values involved are universal, important for the whole world. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which music educators have allowed others outside of music education to name who and how they are in the world. Often comfortable with voicing advocacy and purpose from the status of second class citizen, music educators are complicit in the very processes of reproduction they wish to challenge. Seeking to address what could be a privileged positioning of marginalized status, this paper also speaks to the spaces that are created that could afford possibilities of (...) transformation. Thus, rather than to allow the perceived netherworld of marginalized status to name who we are and can be, we can name our own reality as we challenge the ways in which our own thoughts, beliefs, and actions are acquired and reproduced. (shrink)