Æstheticism.- Theosophy.- Otherism.- Faith cure.- Pessimism.- Agnosticism.- Materialism.- Spiritualism.- Liberalism.- Mormonism.- Christian science.- Socialism.

Paisley Livingston asks questions about the arguments Philosopher George M. Wilson offers in order to establish that the Mediated Version of his Imagined Seeing Thesis is superior to other options.

Les conceptions de Georges Duby ont eu un profond impact sur la manière dont les médiévistes en Amérique considèrent le Moyen Âge. Son héritage est sans doute le plus net en ce qui concerne l’étude des femmes dans cette période. G. Duby a défini l’expérience féminine comme marquée par la répression et l’absence de pouvoir. De fait, il a défini la période médiévale comme le « mâle » Moyen Âge. Nombre de chercheurs américains ne s’accordent pas avec la description des (...) femmes qu’il a présentée. Leur examen des documents de la pratique, telles les chartes, les a menés à dresser un tableau très différent de l’expérience féminine. Là où G. Duby et ses disciples décèlent domination masculine et répression, ces chercheurs ont découvert que les femmes exerçaient pouvoir et influence, étaient des membres respectés de la société où elles vivaient et apparaissaient dans tous les aspects de la vie médiévale. (shrink)

George Cotkin's paper is an earnest effort to resolve the supposed conflict between inherited historical circumstances and the enunciation of ethical principles-as if necessity and freedom, past and present, somehow exclude each other; as if "moral history" is something new; as if the injection of an authorial voice or point of view gets us beyond the absurdities of "objectivity." Clearly Cotkin has not been reading historical monographs published since, say, 1935. Is there a field not reanimated by the moral (...) problems of exclusion, oppression, and obligation framed by the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and then the "new social movements" organized around questions of identity and sexuality? (shrink)

This book seeks to explore relations starting from Stanley Cavell’s claim that philosophy and autobiography are dimensions of each other, first by seeking to develop a philosophy of autobiography, and then by exploring the issue from the side of six autobiographical works. This volume argues that there are good reasons for thinking that philosophical texts can be considered autobiographical, and then turns to discuss the autobiographies of Walter Benjamin, Peter Weiss, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Edmund Gosse and Albert Camus. (...) In exploring these works, this volume explores how they put into question certain received understandings of what philosophical texts suppose themselves to be doing, and also how they themselves constitute philosophical explorations of certain key issues, e.g. the self, death, religious and ethical consciousness, sensuality, the body. Throughout, there is an exploration of the ways in which autobiographies help us in thinking about self-knowledge and knowledge of others. A final chapter raises some issues concerning the fact that the six autobiographies discussed here are all texts dealing with childhood. (shrink)

According to what is now the standard account in the history of psychology, in the 1880s William James and the Danish physician Carl Georg Lange independently developed a strikingly new theory, commonly referred to as the ‘James–Lange’ theory of emotion. In this paper it is argued that this standard account is highly misleading. Lange's views on affect in his Om Sindsbevægelser were more cautious than James allowed, and not open to criticisms that have often been levelled against the theory of (...) emotion that James claimed he shared with Lange. In fact, Lange argued for distinctions that James did not mention in his discussion of Lange's work. Even with regard to the primary emotions, the two thinkers’ explanatory models diverged significantly. The contrast between James and Lange on affect is especially striking in their respective discussions of topics in aesthetics, as is established with reference to Lange's little-known Bidrag til Nydelsernes fysiologi som grundlag for en rationel æstetik. (shrink)

The theory of needs has a political problem. Whilst contemporary theorists largely recognise that politics plays an important part in many of the processes surrounding our needs, they nevertheless hang onto the notion that our most important needs can be determined outside of the political. This article challenges that framing. It does so through a taxonomy and critique of the major contemporary approaches to needs. Considering the works of Len Doyal and Ian Gough, Martha Nussbaum, and Lawrence Hamilton, I (...) divide these into three strands: theories that attempt to avoid, solve, and improve the politics of need. Despite some major differences, these approaches share an understanding of the underlying challenges involved in discerning which needs matter. That framing, I argue, is responsible for certain intractable difficulties that leave needs theorists unable to provide the solutions they demand to the theoretical dilemma they posit. Moreover, in attempting to find those solutions, these theories end up ignoring their partisan implications. The conclusion I reach is that the political theory of needs is not very ‘political’ at all, and that this represents the root of the problem. I thus suggest an alternative, politically realist framing that conceptualises needs as constitutively political. (shrink)

A unitary transformation replaces the given description of a quantum system by an equivalent one. It is observed, however, that not all members of a set of unitarily equivalent Hamilton operators are equally well suited for identifying the corresponding classical systems. A criterion is proposed for recognizing the privileged representatives of the set. A few explicit examples are reported that show the criterion at work.

Raimond Gaita’s work in moral philosophy is unusual and important in focusing on the concept of sainthood. Drawing partly on the work of George Orwell, and partly on the life and work of Simone Weil, as well as on further material, I argue that Gaita’s use of this notion to help make sense of the concept of human preciousness is unconvincing, not least because he does not properly explore the figure and psychology of the saint in any detail. I (...) relatedly argue that the notion of human preciousness in question is implausible and, in some ways, sentimental. I also explore Gaita’s concept of “speaking personally” in moral philosophy, and suggest that matters here are a great deal more complicated than he supposes. (shrink)

Several debates of the last years within the research field of contemporary realism – known under titles such as "New Realism," "Continental Realism," or "Speculative Materialism" – have shown that science is not systematically the ultimate measure of truth and reality. This does not mean that we should abandon the notions of truth or objectivity all together, as has been posited repeatedly within certain currents of twentieth century philosophy. However, within the research field of contemporary realism, the concept of objectivity (...) itself has not been adequately refined. What is objective is supposed to be true outside a subject’s biases, interpretations and opinions, having truth conditions that are met by the way the world is. The volume combines articles of internationally outstanding authors who have published on either Idealism, Epistemic Relativism, or Realism and often locate themselves within one of these divergent schools of thought. As such, the volume focuses on these traditions with the aim of clarifying what the concept objectivity nowadays stands for within contemporary ontology and epistemology beyond the analytic-continental divide. With articles from: Jocelyn Benoist, Ray Brassier, G. Anthony Bruno, Dominik Finkelde, Markus Gabriel, Deborah Goldgaber, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Johannes Hübner, Andrea Kern, Anton F. Koch, Martin Kusch, Paul M. Livingston, Paul Redding, Sebastian Rödl, Dieter Sturma. (shrink)

I have elsewhere argued that the original American pragmatists revolutionized twentieth-century European philosophy by determining or reshaping the intellectual agendas of Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Émile Durkheim, Georges Sorel, Jean Wahl, and Alexandre Kojève. I have also argued that the “critique of the subject” proposed by poststructuralist feminists—particularly by Judith Butler—becomes more coherent and consequential when we rewrite its Nietzschean genealogy to include its pragmatist antecedents.1 In this space, I want to argue that William James and John Dewey are better (...) guides to the end of modernity than Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, who still reign as the court poets of the .. (shrink)

Books reviewed:Victor H. Matthews, Bernard M. Levinson and Tikva Frymer‐Kensky, Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near EastNeil Asher Silberman and David B. Small, The Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the PresentErich S. Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish TraditionBrenda Deen Schildgen, Power and Prejudice: The Reception of the Gospel of MarkDavid C. Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and Social Setting of the Matthean CommunityAllan D. Fitzgerald, Augustine (...) Through the Ages: An EncyclopediaLionel R. Wickham, Hilary of Poitiers: Conflicts of Conscience and Law in the Fourth‐Century ChurchAidan Nichols, The Word Has Been Abroad: A Guide Through Balthasar's AestheticsAidan Nichols, No Bloodless Myth: A Guide Through Balthasar's DramaticsPaul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and TheologyGarrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious ImaginationL. William Countryman, The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual TraditionRaphael Gallagher and Seán Cannon, Seán O'Riordan, A Theologian of Development: Selected EssaysJames Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter EyesPeter Byrne, The Moral Interpretation of ReligionBrian Davies, Philosophy of Religion: A Guide to the SubjectGrace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of ReligionKeith E. Yandell, Philosophy of Religion: A Contemporary IntroductionLouis Dupré, Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection: Excursions in the Phenomenology and Philosophy of ReligionMichael E. Allsopp, Ethics and the Catechism of the Catholic ChurchCharles E. Curran, The Catholic Moral Tradition Today: A SynthesisBernard Hoose, Christian Ethics: An IntroductionPaul Goodliff, Care in a Confused Climate: Pastoral Care and Postmodern CultureSouzy Dracopoulou, Ethics and Values in Health Care ManagementMichael Parker, Ethics and Community in the Health Care ProfessionsHans Küng and Walter Jens, A Dignified Dying: A Plea for Personal ResponsibilityRobin Gill, Euthanasia and the ChurchesGerald Dworkin, R. G. Frey and Sissela Bok, Euthanasia and Physician‐Assisted SuicideCaroline Dunn, Ethical Issues in Mental IllnessDavid Smith, Life and Morality: Contemporary Medico‐Moral IssuesGilbert C. Meilaender, Body, Soul and BioethicsDavid E. Cooper and Joy A. Palmer, Spirit of the EnvironmentJ. Milburn Thompson, Justice and Peace: A Christian PrimerMaura M. Ryan and Todd David Whitmore, The Challenge of Global Stewardship: Roman Catholic ResponsesCelia Deane‐Drummond, Theology and Biotechnology: Implications for a New ScienceJohn O'Neill, The Market: Ethics, Knowledge and PoliticsErika Rummel, The Humanist–Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and the ReformationInger Ekrem, Minna Skafte Jensen and Egil Kraggerud, Reformation and Latin Literature in Northern EuropeM. C. Questier, Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George BirkheadJeffrey von Arx, Varieties of UltramontanismFrank J. Coppa, Controversial Concordats: The Vatican's Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini and HitlerA. J. Hoover, God, Britain and Hitler in World War II: The View of the British Clergy, 1939–;1945Pierre Blet, Pius XII and the Second World War according to the Archives of the VaticanPeter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural ScienceMichael P. Hornsby‐Smith, Catholics in England, 1950–2000: Historical and Sociological PerspectivesCarol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920Robert E. Burns, Being Catholic, Being American: The Notre Dame Story, 1842–1934Paul C. Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880Harriet A. Harris, Fundamentalism and EvangelicalsJeffrey Richards, Scott Wilson and Linda Woodhead,Diana: The Making of a Media Saint. (shrink)

Review of Seeing fictions in film: the epistemology of movies, by George M. Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

In the recent history of philosophy few works have appeared which favorably portray Idealism as a plausible philosophical view of the world. Considerably less has been written about Idealism as a viable framework for doing theology. While the most recent and significant works on Idealism, composed by the late John Foster (Case for Idealism and A World for Us: The Case for Phenomenological Idealism), have put this theory back on the philosophical map, no such attempt has been made to re-introduce (...) Idealism to contemporary Christian theology. Idealism and Christian Theology is such a work, retrieving ideas and arguments from its most significant modern exponents (especially George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards) in order to assess its value for present and future theological construction. As a piece of constructive philosophical-theology itself, this volume considers the explanatory power an Idealist ontology has for contemporary Christian theology. (shrink)

"One of the outstanding authorities on the early days of the Republic, Saul K. Padover offers in this volume a generous sampling of the letters, essays, speeches, discourses, and personal documents--many of them previously unpublished--of the men who made America. Included are extensive selections from the papers and speeches of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. There are also copious extracts from the private and public utterances of secondary, but important, figures (...) of the founding days--Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, William Paterson, Benjamin Rush, George Wythe, and many others. A number of the speeches made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 are given in full, and several of the important debates are reproduced. John Dickinson's Letters from an American Farmer in Pennsylvania appear in these pages as well as many of Alexander Hamilton's famous and brief opinions. Also included are John Hancock's speech on the Boston Massacre; Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia; James Madison's Memorial against Religious Assessments; two of the most important of John Marshall's Supreme Court decisions (Marbury vs. Madison and McCulloch vs. Maryland); Robert Morris' Letters on Finance; John Taylor's paper On Aristocracy, and William Paterson's Plan for a Constitution. Taken together, these writings offer in one volume a complete picture of the thinking, the debate, the legal maneuvers, the compromises, the manners, and the morals of the American nation's earliest days. The book provides a sound basic appreciation of the atmosphere in which the Founding Fathers worked and planned and debated with one another. All the many counter-currents that contributed to the building of the Constitution, the stresses to which the young nation was subjected, the rebellion that continued to seethe, the moral climate of the days--these are all recreated in the speeches and writings of America's first patriots. Dr. Padover has bound the selections together with enlightening commentary that enables the reader to understand the exact circumstances of each utterance and brings the particular work into historical perspective."--Jacket. (shrink)

In the April 2008 issue (volume 69, issue number 2) of the Journal of the History of Ideas, George Cotkin published his article, "History's Moral Turn." Four essays responding to Cotkin's article, written by Neil Jumonville, Michael O'Brien, James Livingston, and Lewis Perry, were also published in the April 2008 issue. In this essay, "A Conversation about Morals and History," Cotkin addresses the critiques of each of these four historians.

Focusing on the works of Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Sir William Hamilton, Thomas Brown and James Frederick Ferrier, this book offers a definitive account of an important philosophical movement, and represents a ground-breaking contribution to scholarship in the area. Essential reading for philosophers or anyone with an interest in the history of philosophical thought.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME'S DIALOGUES AND THE REDEFINITION OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION GEORGE ScHNER, S.J. Regis College Toronto, Ontario HETHER ONE IS rethinking the content of a course and the place of one's study in the context of a broader curriculum, or whether there is a moment of fundamental questioning which grows out of rereading a classic text or engaging in contemporary debates, such moments of questioning are essential. This (...) essay proposes one of those simple and general questions: in what does the work of the philosophy of religion consist? My consideration of the question, as will become evident, is an exercise in prolegomena, and after this brief introduction there will be two parts to my essay in which the context for a full answer to the question will be explored, before a summary conc1usion will propose an agenda for ful1ther work. Though concept clarification is essential to philosophical reflection, attention to historical development is of equal importance. The two inner parts of this essay will give attention to both, first by discussing a specific texrt and,author, and then by sorting out some fundamental matters of definition. My choice of a classic text and context is David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.1 Such a choice is not to imply that the philosophy of religion begins there or that Hume's notion of either philosophy or religion is: somehow normative. On the contrary, I am entering rthe story in mid1 Dialogues Oonoerning Naturai Religion, ed. R. H. Popkin (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co., 1980). References will be indicated within the text by page number. 88 84 GEORGE SCHNER, S.j. stream and am not of the mind that any philosophy is definitive. However, I wish to propose a reading of Hume's text which can be very helpful not only to understand what he is about but also to encourage a rethinking of what the philosophy of religion should be about. Simply as a text, Hume's Dialogues is intriguing. He withheld its publication on the advice of seveml of his friends and continued to revise it until his death, altering nearly every page styJistica1ly and substantively changing all hut four sections. :Before he died, he ensured that his nephew David would have the work published and was busy with some of the most lengthy additions to the text in the last months before his death.2 The work and its contents dearly remained a matter of importance and preoccupation for Hurne, and both the contents and form of the text present essentials of Hume's mature thought. The apparent meandering of the text, as a dialogue among the characters Cleanthes, Philo, and Demea, belies its careful construction. Despite Cleanthes' accusation that Philo proposes his notions in a " rambling way," the logic of the text is a masterpiece of exposition, movement, internal reference, and cumulative rhetorical effect. David Livingston has recently discussed the dialect~cal and narrative character of Hume's writing considered in general as a philosophy of "common life." 3 Hume is seen as both the critic of false philosophy and the artificer of the true by means of the application of his principles of the association of ideas, of nrutural beliefs, of sympathy. In both efforts, Livingston finds Hume increasingly employing narrative aocounts and dialectical argument as he develops his,thought, until in the Dialogues "inquiry is cut free of all systematic constraints and allowed to proceed on its own." 4 I find the insight into Hume's paradigmatic use of 2 These and other details concerning the Dialogues can be found in Ernest C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). s D. W. Livingston, Hume's Philosophy of Comm01~ Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), esp. chapter two. 4 Livingston, 43. HUME.AND PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 85 the narrative structure of historical inquiry a helpful clue, but I wouJd modify Livingston's assertion of the abandonment of systematic constraints in the Dialogues. Hume's corrective of speculative systems does not mean that his own text is devoid of a logic or ol'der quite in keeping with the demands of narrative structure, common life, and the past-entailing aspects... (shrink)

Exchanges in the nineteenth century between Sir William Hamilton, James Frederick Ferrier and the French philosopher Victor Cousin are crucial to understanding contemporary efforts to preserve the continuity of the Scottish philosophical tradition on the part of those alive to new themes emanating from Kant and philosophy in Germany. Ferrier's strategy aimed at re-invigorating Descartes and Berkeley by drawing on elements in Adam Smith's social philosophy. But the promising steps taken in this direction in Ferrier's essays on consciousness were (...) seriously undermined, in Cousin's view, by the aprioristic character of his Institutes, in which he abandoned the careful empirical method characteristic of Scottish philosophy as practiced by Reid. (shrink)

Both my deflationary approach to aesthetic experience and what I call moderate moralism have been challenged recently in the pages of the British Journal of Aesthetics by Paisley Livingston, Robert Stecker, and George Dickie. In this essay, I attempt to deal with their objections while also trying to move the debate to new ground.

A Meditator's Diary. A Western woman's unique experience in Thailand monasteries. Jane Hamilton-Merritt. Unwin Paperbacks, George Allen & Unwin, London 1986. 157 pp. £3.95.

ABSTRACT This essay aims at reconsidering the impact of Physiocratic ideas on the United States context during and after the American Revolution, which represented the first turning point concerning the democratic implications of political economy. In the confrontation in the 1790s between Jefferson’s Republicans and Hamilton’s Federalists the early scientific analysis of economics, grounded in the central role of agriculture formulated by Physiocracy, gave strong theoretical validation of the agrarian democracy ideology as an alternative to the British model and (...) contributed to shaping the American identity. The article will investigate this opposition and the economic culture that provides theoretical foundations to two opposed political projects. The reasons and the forms of this impact will be explored through the confrontation between Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures and George Logan’s series of pamphlets conceived as an orchestrated campaign against the Secretary of the Treasury. The study of Physiocracy beyond Europe and the Old Regime can offer new and divergent outlooks compared to recent studies aiming at questioning the relevance of Physiocratic theory in the Old Regime social and political context and its impact during the French Revolution. (shrink)

This PhD dissertation examines the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the most general and most widely used framework for understanding social evolution, W. D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection. While the core idea is intuitive enough (when organisms share genes, they sometimes have an evolutionary incentive to help one another), its apparent simplicity masks a host of conceptual subtleties, and the theory has proved a perennial source of controversy in evolutionary biology. To move towards a resolution of these controversies, (...) we need a careful and rigorous analysis of the philosophical foundations of the theory. My aim in this work is to provide such an analysis. I begin with an examination of the concepts behavioural ecologists employ to describe and classify types of social behaviour. I stress the need to distinguish concepts that are often conflated: for example, we need to distinguish simple cooperation from collaboration in collective tasks, behaviours from strategies, and control from manipulation and coercion. I proceed from here to the formal representation of kin selection via George R. Price’s covariance selection mathematics. I address a number of interpretative issues the Price formalism raises, including the vexed question of whether kin selection theory is ‘formally equivalent’ to multi-level selection theory. In the second half of the dissertation, I assess the uses and limits of Hamilton’s rule for the evolution of social behaviour; I provide a precise statement of the conditions under which the rival neighbour-modulated fitness and inclusive fitness approaches in contemporary kin selection theory are equivalent (and describe cases in which they are not); and I criticize recent formal attempts to establish the controversial claim that kin selection leads to organisms behaving as if maximizing their inclusive fitness. (shrink)

Kit Fine’s arguments in Essence and Modality are widely accepted as being a decisive blow against modal essentialism. A selection of replies exist that have done little to counter the general view that modally construed essence is out of touch with what we really mean when we make essentialist claims. I argue that Fine’s arguments fail to strike a decisive blow, and I suggest a new interpretation of the debate that shows why Fine’s arguments fall short of achieving their goal.

Modal propositional logic; Modal predicate logic; A survey of modal logic.

Beginning with Sir William Hamilton's revitalisation of philosophy in Scotland in the 1830s, Gordon Graham takes up the theme of George Davie's The Democratic Intellect and explores a century of debates surrounding the identity and continuity of the Scottish philosophical tradition. Gordon Graham identifies a host of once-prominent but now neglected thinkers - such as Alexander Bain, J. F. Ferrier, Thomas Carlyle, Alexander Campbell Fraser, John Tulloch, Henry Jones, Henry Calderwood, David Ritchie and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison - whose (...) reactions to Hume and Reid stimulated new currents of ideas. Graham concludes by considering the relation between the Scottish philosophical tradition and the 20th-century philosopher John Macmurray. (shrink)

In previous writings, I proposed that we dehumanize others by attributing the essence of a less-than-human creature to them, in order to disable inhibitions against harming them. However, this account is inconsistent with the fact that dehumanizers implicitly, and often explicitly, acknowledge the human status of their victims. I propose that when we dehumanize others, we regard them as simultaneously human and subhuman. Drawing on the work of Ernst Jentsch, Mary Douglas, and Noël Carroll, I argue that the notion of (...) dehumanized people as metaphysically transgressive provides important insights into the distinctive phenomenology of dehumanization. (shrink)