It seems that we can know moral truths. We are also rather reluctant to defer to moral testimony. But it’s not obvious how moral cognitivism is compatible with pessimism about moral testimony. If moral truths are knowable, shouldn’t it be possible for others to know moral truths you don’t know, so that it is wise for you to defer to what they say? Or, alternatively, if it’s always reasonable to refuse to defer to the wisest among us, doesn’t this show (...) that morality is not genuinely cognitive? There is a tension in our commonsense moral epistemology. In this chapter I (a) explicate this tension, (b) criticize how others have attempted to resolve it, and finally (c) explain how Rossian deontology helps us see that the tension is only apparent: morality is indeed knowable, despite the fact that it is usually wise to refuse to defer to moral testimony. (shrink)

The subject of this two-part article is the bearing of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings, and of their reception, upon the development of Religionswissenschaft or the comparative study of religion. This first part opens by taking account of Kierkegaard’s own awareness of, and relationship to, “non-Christian” religions, including his late reading of Schopenhauer; then considers Kierkegaard in juxtaposition with his contemporary F. Max Müller, the Sanskritist and foundational pioneer of comparative religion, and the two men’s contrasting relations to F.W.J. Schelling; and finally (...) examines the interest taken in Kierkegaard by William James, Max Weber, and Gerardus van der Leeuw as early twentieth-century contributors through three different disciplines to the study of comparative religion. (shrink)

El Cuerpo sin Órganos tiene que herir. Lo cual significa, para el filósofo, que el CsO desorgan- izará su identidad filosófica. Como tal, el CsO estalla en medio de la obra de Gilles Deleuze y es la marca de una ruptura entre una Lógica del sentido y una Lógica de la sensación, entre una biofilosofía y una biopolítica, contemporánea de los acontecimientos de mayo del 68 y del comienzo de la colaboración de Deleuze con Félix Guattari. Mientras que antes de (...) la ruptura existe una superficie de singularidades móviles que expresa una deleuziana maquinaria estructuralista del sentido, después de dicha ruptura el pensamiento logra su auténtica materialidad en conceptos llenos de vida, conceptos que han sido construidos maquínicamente y que expresan acontecimientos. El pensamiento no es ya inmanente a la vida, sino que se trata de la dimensión vital de la vida que se arroja a lo impensado gracias a la ruptura producida por el CsO. Este arrojarse da lugar a la sensación, entendida como la dimensión tanto estética como política del CsO, que crea nuevas posibilidades para la vida. A la postre, la biopolítica resulta coextensiva tanto del arte como de la filosofía, haciendo válida como a ninguna otra la pregunta de Deleuze y de Guattari: «¿cómo hacerse un cuerpo sin órganos?». (shrink)

Résumé Leviathan Toth, la contre-“installation” que Ernesto Neto a suspendue aux voûtes du Panthéon à l’automne 2006 n’exploite pas l’espace de ce lieu de mémoire national pour s’exposer («art environnemental»). Il affronte toutes ses coordonnées physiques, esthétiques, politiques, métaphysiques, pour s’en prendre à l’Art de la représentation dont le frontispice du Léviathan montrait, au dire même de Hobbes, le rôle constitutif-constitutionnel pour la République. Mettant en scène une manière de Critique et Clinique de la Représentation dans toutes les acceptions du (...) terme à partir du court-circuit (qui est aussi le circuit le plus court) entre politique et esthétique, l’Opération-Neto vise à la dés-organisation expansive de la multitude vivant sous le régime «démocratique» de la représentation contractuelle dont le Panthéon est le temple. Elle donne corps à la perversion rhizomatique-bioénergétique de l’Image de l’État-Machine, de la Forme-État, en projetant un nouveau type de réalité, infra- et supra-organique, qui tire son «énergie» des forces de la multitudo dissoluta (Hobbes) dont elle propose une radicale re-composition vitale. Cette œuvre/non-œuvre qui relève d’un constructivisme politico-esthétique brésilien que l’on s’attache à redéfinir, ne peut dès lors faire l’«objet» que d’une pratique de déplacement incorporante et constituante du spectateur-participant. (shrink)

Bernard Williams argued that philosophers should pay more attention to the role thick ethical concepts play in our moral thinking, and, separately, that all reasons for action depend in the first place upon the agent's pre-exisitng motives. Here I argue that these two views are in tension. Much like the standard examples of thick ethical concepts, the concept REASONABLE is likewise thick, and the features of the world that guide its correct use have much less to do with the agent's (...) pre-existing motives than internalism about reasons for action maintains. (shrink)

This paper examines Larry A. Hickman’s warnings about the dangers of algorithmic technologies for democracy and then considers educational policy initiatives that are important for combatting such threats over the long term. John Dewey’s philosophy is considered both in Hickman’s work and in this paper’s review of what Dewey called the “Supreme Intellectual Obligation.” Dewey’s insights highlight crucial tasks necessary and called for with respect to education to value and appreciate the sciences and what they can do to serve humanity. (...) At the same time, a significant cultural effort is needed to ensure that schools are empowered to do this vital work and that the public is informed and enabled to demand the leadership and initiatives that democracy needs to safeguard against threats to it. (shrink)

In this essay, I review the writings of three philosophers whose work converges on the insight that we must attend to and reconstruct culture for the sake of justice. John Rawls, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty help show some of the ways in which culture can enable or undermine the pursuit of justice. They also offer resources for identifying tools for addressing the cultural challenges impeding justice. I reveal insights and challenges in Rawls’s philosophy as well as tools and solutions (...) for building on and addressing them in Dewey’s and Rorty’s philosophy. (shrink)

This paper addresses the alleged tension between the kind of strong apophaticism endorsed by Maimonides and his view of worshiping God. After considering some extant resolutions to this problem, I offer a proposal that utilizes the role of silence and imitative activity in Maimonides. While this solution may not have been one that Maimonides would have offered, I argue that Maimonides had conceptual resources for offering a promising solution within his theological framework.

One aspect of Richard Shusterman’s work is indicative of a broad movement to develop a robust philosophy of embodiment. Thinkers from diverse fields—such as feminism, pragmatism, and continental philosophy—have criticized Western philosophy’s suppression of embodiment and have gone on to suggest how the philosophy of the body can enrich our understanding of issues that arise within traditional fields such as ethics and aesthetics. Further, work in this area can provide novel insights into personal identity, gender, linguistics, and philosophy of mind. (...) Shusterman’s contribution to the field is somaesthetics, the critical and meliorative study of embodied experience that views the human body as a locus of .. (shrink)

as de michelis has argued, americans have been fascinated by the psychosomatic discipline of yoga since the turn of the twentieth century.1 The transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson were influenced by Vedantic philosophy, and William James was intrigued by neo-Vedantic yogic practices as promulgated by Swami Vivekananda.2 Since then, yoga has become a global phenomenon with approximately 20.4 million Americans regularly practicing the discipline.3 In this essay, I will consider the implications of yoga practice for pragmatist philosophy and, more specifically, for (...) the discipline of somaesthetics as developed by Richard Shusterman. (shrink)

During the campaign of may 1940 and the following month, King Leopold III had as principal political counsellor Henri De Man. He played a primordial role during that period, which was rich with extremely important events for the future of Belgium, such as the surrender of the army and the problem of the King reassuming or not his constitutionalprerogative during the occupation. The former socialist minister did not accidentally hold the situation of confident of the King. Indeed, both men became (...) friends before the war.They shared similar conceptions about interior and foreign policyproblems.In fact, Leopold III supported De Man in his attempt, during the winter 1938-1939, to convoke a peace conference. On the other end early 1939 they both expressed rather similar conceptions on the functioning of the Belgian institutions and especially on the lack of authority of the executive power. The projects of manifestoes by De Man concerning the political future of Belgium were grounded on a reinforcement of the executive power. So the manifesto of june 1940, a consequence of De Man's contacts with the King, reveals the role which the King should or could have assumed if Hitler had permitted it. (shrink)

With a few exceptions, much of epistemology in the last century has been dominated by discussions centered on knowledge, and in particular propositional knowledge (along with associated concepts such as justification, the reliability of cognitive processes, etc.). Recently, attention has been given to other cognitive states such as understanding and wisdom, due in some part to the resurgence of theorizing about intellectual virtues. As with typical epistemic concepts such as justification and knowledge, offering an analysis of wisdom has been difficult. (...) In this paper, I critique a recent attempt to analyze wisdom as risk-taking, and after gleaning from the insights of Thomas Aquinas, I defend a particular version of the wisdom-as-understanding approach. (shrink)

God gave Scripture to his people for many reasons. Two of the most important are the subversive and the therapeutic. This article concentrates on the former. All humans are blind to the extent of their alienation from God, others, and themselves. Christians have begun the process of salvation, part of which includes growth in theocentric self-awareness, and God uses Scripture to promote this growth. Christians, however, face a formidable challenge at this point, because in our remaining sin, we can also (...) distort Scripture for sinful purposes. As a result, God has to use Scripture subversively and indirectly in order to enable Christians to read the Bible to promote the healing of inward deepening. A case for this agenda will be made from the Bible itself and the Christian tradition. (shrink)

There are powerful fairness and efficiency arguments for making charitable donations to soup kitchens 100% deductible. These arguments have no purchase for donations to fund opulent church organs, yet these too are 100% deductible under the current tax code. This stark dichotomy is only the tip of the iceberg. Looking at a wider sampling of charitable gifts reveals a charitable continuum. Based on sliding scales for efficiency, multiple theories of fairness, pluralism, institutional competence and social welfare dictate that charitable deductions (...) should in most cases be fractions between zero and one. Moreover, the Central Limit Theorem strongly suggests that combining this welter of largely independent criteria with the wide variety of charitable gifts results in a classic bell-shaped normal curve of optimal deductions, with a peak at some central value and quickly decaying to zero at the extremes of 0% and 100%. Given that those are the only two options under the current tax code, the current charitable deduction regime inevitably makes large errors in most cases. Actually calculating a precise optimal percentage for each type of charitable donation is of course impractical. This Article suggests, however, that we can do much better than the systematically erroneous current charitable deduction. Granting a 100% deduction only for donations to the desperately poor, along with 50%, 25%, and 0% for gifts yielding progressively fewer efficiency, fairness, pluralism, and institutional competence benefits, promises to deliver a socially more desirable charitable deduction. (shrink)

It is surely not coincidental that the term "soul" should mean not only the center of a creature's life and consciousness, but also a thing or action characterized by intense vivacity ("that bike's got soul!"). It also seems far from coincidental that the same contemporary academic discussions that have largely cast aside the language of "soul" in their quest to define the character of human mental life should themselves be so--how to say it?--bloodless, so lacking in soul. This volume arises (...) from the opposite premise, namely that the task of understanding human nature is bound up with and in important respects dependent upon the more critical task of learning to be fully human, of learning to have soul. The papers collected here are derived from a conference in Oxford sponsored by the Centre of Theology and Philosophy and together explore the often surprising landscape that emerges when human consciousness is approached from this angle. Drawing upon literary, philosophical, theological, historical, and musical modes of analysis, the essays of this volume vividly remind the reader of the power of the ancient language of soul over against contemporary impulses to reduce, fragment, and overly determine human selfhood. (shrink)

Justice, Sustainability, and Security not only enhances our knowledge of these issues, but it teases out our moral dimensions and offer prescriptions for how governments and global actors might craft their policies to better consider their effects on the global human condition.

This chapter examines David Lewis's view that we are temporal parts of animals. It examines three arguments for the view that persisting things have temporal parts–four‐dimensionalism. One is that it solves the problem of temporary intrinsics. The second is that it solves metaphysical problems about the persistence of material objects without the mystery of constitutionalism–though these solutions require a counterpart‐theoretic account of modality. The third is that it solves problems of personal identity–involving fission, for instance–in an attractive way. It is (...) then argued that according to four‐dimensionalism, the bearers of such properties as thinking and acting are momentary stages, forcing us to choose between saying that we don't strictly think and saying that we don't persist. (shrink)

Of the many illustrious figures of the Buyid period none is perhaps as intriguing, or as enigmatic, as Abū Hayyān al-Tawhīdī. We know all too little of his biography. He was probably born between 310/922 and 932 but whether in Baghdad, Shiraz, or Nishapur remains uncertain. From his works we know that he studied in Baghdad under such renowned scholars as the jurist and qādī Abū Hāmid al-Marwazī. He tells us that he was in Mecca in 353/964 and, in 366/976, (...) at the court of the vizier Abū al-Fath Ibn al-'Amīd in Rayy—an unhappy experience that informs his scathing portrayal of that vizier, as of the Sāhib Ibn 'Abbād, in his Akhlāq al-Wazīrayn, one of his literary masterpieces. More significantly for the book under... (shrink)