First published in 1848, Frederick Grimke's book, in the words of the editor, "deserves comparison with Tocqueville's justly famous work, Democracy in America, and is in certain ways superior. It is the single best book written by an American in the nineteenth century on the meaning of our political way of life." A second edition of Grimke's work was published in 1856, and a third edition appeared posthumously in 1871, but since then this classic in American thought has been (...) almost completely lost to sight. Grimke was born in South Carolina in 1791, and later moved to Ohio where he became a judge. He remained a bachelor, led a rich and cosmopolitan intellectual life, and accumulated an excellent library. His sisters Angelina (wife of the abolitionist Theodore Weld) and Sarah were both famous for deserting their South Carolina heritage and becoming active in the abolition and woman suffrage movements. In 1842 Grimke retired from the bench to devote the remainder of his life to study and writing, setting himself the task of educating his contemporaries in the nature of their society. His major achievement was The Nature and Tendency of Free Institutions. Grimke's range of topics includes the right of the majority, the character and operation of elective governments, the function of political parties, the American contrasted with the English and French constitutions, and the separation of powers in the American political systems. He sees governmental institutions as the expression of the general structure of society which calls them into being. In his Introduction, Mr. Ward points to Grimke's thesis "that the separation of powers in the frame of the American constitution works not because power is distributed within the government but because all branches of the government are, directly or indirectly, responsible to the will of the majority of the people outside the doors of government." As a result of the party system, Grimke wrote, "we may vary the paraphernalia of government as much as we please, but it still obstinately persists in every one of its departments to be a government based upon the popular will." Mr. Ward calls attention to Grimke's passionate belief that "freedom is its own justification" and that its ultimate value is that "it created the kind of character which made freedom possible." He held that "the only way to make a man fit for freedom is to give him freedom." Yet, unlike his sisters, he shared a view of race that was pervasive in his time and was unable to imagine the extension of freedom to the slave. In contradiction to his views of government and freedom, he upheld Negro slavery even to the extent of sanctioning secession to protect it. To him, "the open affirmation of the right of secession would serve to maintain the Union, not destroy it.". (shrink)

Introduction The central aim of this book is to focus attention upon and illuminate the character of a certain phase of philosophical reflection: namely, ...

Derek Parfit est célèbre pour avoir soutenu que l'identité personnelle ne comptait pas pour déterminer la survie d'une personne. Sa phrase « personal identity is not what matters » est inspirée d'une approche réductionniste de l'identité personnelle qui consiste à dire que la personne humaine se réduit à un corps, un cerveau et une série d'événements mentaux causalement liés. Dans cette optique, ce qui compte, c'est la continuité psychologique. Cet article vise à montrer que dans des dynamiques de reconnaissances, l'identité (...) personnelle peut compter dans la définition de l'identité personnelle à travers le temps ; en deux mots, que l'identité personnelle compte. Partant des conceptions narrativistes défendues par Paul Ricoeur et Charles Taylor, j'en viens à défendre une théorie constructiviste-institutionnaliste de l'identité personnelle qui prend en considération le caractère institué et construit de l'identité personnelle. Le but de cet article est donc de défendre la thèse selon laquelle l'identité personnelle compte pour dans les réflexions éthiques et politiques. (shrink)

Critics of Divine Command Theory (DCT) have advanced the counterpossible terrible commands objection. They argue that DCT implies the counterpossible ‘If a necessarily morally perfect God commanded us to perform a terrible act, then the terrible act would be morally obligatory.’ However, this counterpossible is false. Hence, DCT is false. Philipp Kremers has proposed that the intuition that the counterpossible above is false is due to conversational implicatures. By providing a pragmatic explanation for the intuition, he thinks that DCT proponents (...) can then maintain that the counterpossible is actually true. In this article, I argue that Kremers's conversational implicature response fails because (a) there is good reason to think that no conversational implicature arises given what critics of DCT have expressed, (b) a competent reader would not understand the critics' utterance that TCC is false as implicating that TCC* is false, and (c) the counterpossible terrible commands objection can be easily modified to be immune to the conversational implicature response by cancelling any potential implicature. Thus, an appeal to conversational implicatures cannot save DCT from the counterpossible terrible commands objection. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the thought of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who is one of the most significant Christian writers of the Middle Ages. It pays particular attention to the Aquinas's context as a Dominican friar, devoted to the task of preaching the Christian gospel.

In this important and pioneering book Frederick Newmeyer takes on the question of language variety. He considers why some language types are impossible and why some grammatical features are more common than others. The task of trying to explain typological variation among languages has been mainly undertaken by functionally-oriented linguists. Generative grammarians entering the field of typology in the 1980s put forward the idea that cross-linguistic differences could be explained by linguistic parameters within Universal Grammar, whose operation might vary (...) from language to language. Unfortunately, this way of looking at variation turned out to be much less successful than had been hoped for. Professor Newmeyer's alternative to parameters combines leading ideas from functionalist and formalist approaches which in the past have been considered incompatible. He throws fresh light on language typology and variation, and provides new insights into the principles of Universal Grammar. The book is written in a clear, readable style and will be readily understood by anyone with a couple of years' study of linguistics. It will interest a wide range of scholars and students of language, including typologists, historical linguists, and theorists of every shade. (shrink)

The main contribution of this work is to develop the account of material constitution presented in Spatially Coinciding Objects (Ratio 24, 1982) and a series of related articles. This account was merely ‘analytical’ in that it applied generously to ‘putative’ examples of distinct entities (individuals, pluralities and masses of stuff) in the same place at the same time. The account herein is ‘critical’ in that it seeks justification for recognizing the existence of entities constituted in addition to the entities that (...) allegedly constitute them. While the earlier account used examples such as a clay statue and the clay of the statue for purposes of illustrating material constitution, the present account would consider ‘reducing’ the statue to the clay, and seeks justification for how to resist this and admit the existence of generable and perishable natural objects in general. The justification sought is ‘deep’ in the sense that (unlike the popular ‘method of cases) it does not belong to ‘descriptive’ metaphysics (in Strawson’s sense) but is sufficiently potent to counter ‘revisionist’ views. Transcendental arguments, beginning with austere assumptions of justification itself, are thereby employed. Suggestions are made about what to conclude about our own identity, which amount to supporting animalism. (shrink)

This book contains reference to a number of Sontag's earlier articles on Becker. Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for writing The Denial of Death. His psychological/anthropological writings examined human nature and its tendency to religion. He proposed a self-made «hero religion», but his critique of the assumptions of modern social science equally make possible a return to traditional forms of religion: the return of the Gods.

This paper suggests that quantified negative existentials about fiction—statements of the form “There are some / many / etc. Fs in work W who don't exist”—offer a serious challenge to the theorist of fiction: more serious, in a number of ways, that singular negative existentials. I argue that the temptation to think that only a realist semantics of such statements is plausible should be resisted. There are numerous quantified negative existentials found in other areas that seem equally “true” but where (...) a realist semantics imports ontological commitments that few would want to embrace. In the final part of the paper I sketch an alternative pretense account of one such quantified negative existential, and suggest that the account gives us some reason to believe that quantified negative existentials in general, including quantified negative existentials about fiction, can also be understood in pretense terms. (shrink)

The UK School Curriculum and Assessment Authority proposes a set of values to which everyone can subscribe, which can provide schools with a secure basis for the provision of spiritual, moral, social and cultural education. The proposal is misguided. The code would be determined by political negotiation, which would bring the whole idea of moral education into disrepute, and it would be an impediment to moral advancement, which requires trial and error experimentation. Imposing a code on all state schools would (...) be political indoctrination; and in a pluralistic society any non-vacuous statement of values will meet with objections from some sections of society. Further, the proposed statement of values is open to objections on moral and other grounds. The aims of the proposal would be best met by privatising schools. Given vested-interest opposition to privatisation, the most realistic option is to alter the Local Management of Schools regime to allow schools to innovate in moral teaching and training, to strengthening parental choice, and to increase competition between schools. (shrink)