Strokes of Luck provides a detailed and wide-ranging examination of the role of luck in moral and political philosophy. The first part tackles debates in moral luck, which are concerned with the assignment of blameworthiness to individuals who are separated only by lucky differences. ‘Anti-luckists’ think that an agent who, for example, attempts and succeeds in an assassination and an agent who attempts and fails are equally blameworthy. This book defends an ‘anti-anti-luckist’ argument, according to which the successful assassin is (...) more blameworthy than the unsuccessful one. Moreover, the successful assassin is, all things equal, a worse person than the unsuccessful one. The worldly outcomes of our acts can make an all-important difference, not only to how bad our acts can be deemed, but to how bad we are. The second part enters into debates about distributive justice. It is argued that the attempt to neutralize luck in the distribution of advantages among individuals does not deserve its prominence in political philosophy: the ‘luck egalitarian’ programme is flawed. A better way forward is to re-invest in John Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness, which demonstrates a superior way of taming the bad effects of luck and unchosen disadvantage. (shrink)

W. Norris Clarke's metaphysics of the universe as a journey rests on six major positions: the unrestricted dynamism of the mind, the primacy of the act of existence, the participation structure of reality, and the person, considered as both the starting point of philosophy and the source of the categories needed for a flexible contemporary metaphysics. Reflecting on his conscious life and the universe around him, the finite person mounts by a two-fold path to its Infinite source, who, though immutable (...) in His natural being, is mutable in the intentional being of His personal knowledge and love. The personal God is the efficient cause from whom the universe comes and the final cause to whom it returns.Less optimistic than Norris Clarke, John Caputo wonders about his metaphysics of the person. In a hermeneutical interpretation of the human face, the person through whom Being "sounds" discloses an ambiguous Being that both reveals and conceals itself. Far from grounding a casual ascent to God, hermeneutical phenomenology allows us no more than the right to interpret the world and its transcendent source through our own free decision.Although impressed by Norris Clarke's attempt to introduce mutability into God, Lewis Ford still finds Clarke's Thomistic God unacceptable. As a Whiteheadian, he proposes in place of Thomas' God, whose perfection consists in static unity, a God whose perfection consists in a never-ending process of unification. John Smith argues against the traditional dichotomy made between the ontological and cosmological arguments. Rather than opposed methods of proving God's existence, they should be taken as complementary journeys to the divine presence which discloses itself, although diversely, in the soul and in the world. There are parallels between Smith's historical study of two arguments and Clarke's two-fold path to God. Yet Smith is critical of Thomas' cosmological journey to God and does not share Clarke's confidence in its validity. Significant studies in their own right, the three essays as a group challenge Clarke's whole metaphysics of the universe as a journey. Meeting the challenge, Clarke clarifies and refines his own thought.An account of Clarke's philosophy by Gerald A. McCool, S.J. preceds this unified and stimulating philosophical discussion. (shrink)

Much of Grünbaum's work may be regarded as a careful development and systematic elaboration of the Riemann-Poincaré thesis of the conventionality of congruence, the thesis that the continuous manifolds of space, time, and space-time are intrinsically metrically amorphous, i.e. are devoid of intrinsic metrics. Therefore, to appreciate Grünbaum's philosophical contributions, one must have a clear understanding of what he means by an intrinsic metric. The second and fourth sections of this paper are exegetical; in them we try to piece together, (...) from his sundry remarks about intrinsic metrics, what Grünbaum means by the term 'intrinsic metric.' We shall argue that, the customary carefulness and precision of Grünbaum's writings notwithstanding, there are residual unclarities and difficulties which beset his conception of an intrinsic metric. In the fifth section we shall propose an explication of Grünbaum's notion of an intrinsic metric which seems on the whole faithful to Grünbaum's intuitions and insights and which also seems capable of performing the philosophical services which his work demands of that notion. The third section is a digression on Zeno's metrical paradox of extension. (shrink)

Through an in-depth study of four key figures - Pierre Rousselot, Joseph Marechal, Jacques Maritain, and Etienne Gilson - From Unity to Pluralism traces the evolution of Thomism in the first half of the twentieth century. Through their work, Thomisism encountered contemporary thought and rediscovered its authentic roots, and the ideal of a univocal, unitary doctrine of Scholastic truth embodied in the unambiguous teachings of Thomas Aquinas, which had inspired the Thomist revival at the end of the nineteenth century, gradually (...) gave way. The result is the emergence of pluralism within the system itself and the independent development of the theologies of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. (shrink)

As with the problem of universals, late medieval thinkers were very concerned with the ontological status of relations, for they were central to numerous theological and philosophical problems. These relations were of various types: relations of identity, qualitative similarity, quantitative equality, causal relations, and intentional relations, such as those between knower and the object known. Each of these relations was taken to be an Aristotelian accident. Does it differ from the substance which is related? Broadly speaking, I have discovered four (...) alternative theories: as sentence of the form "a is related by a real relation R to b" is true only if the relation R is an extra-mental thing really distinct from a and b ; R only exists as a concept in a mind ; a and b exist in a certain real way ; the term "R" is connotative, signifying a directly and connoting b . Using printed sources and my critical edition of various codices, I ask the following thinkers whether a real relation is distinct from that which is related: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Richard of Middleton, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Harclay, Hervaeus Natalis, and Peter Aurioli. (shrink)

Soul on the Couch is premised on the belief that discourse about the soul and discourse from the couch can inform, and not simply ignore, one another.

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was one of the most original thinkers of the Renaissance. This collection examines, from several viewpoints, his speculative thought and reviews his ideas on dialogue with non- Christians in the light of his theories. The articles originated in papers presented at several conferences sponsored by the American Cusanus Society, 1981-1988. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Focusing on the speeches and actions of the Platonic Socrates, this book argues that Plato's political philosophy is a crucial source for reflection on the hazards and possibilities of democratic politics.

A partir d'un encrage syndical révolutionnaire, le mouvement Freinet emprunte des techniques et procédés pédagogiques au mouvement international des réformes pédagogiques et s'appuie sur l'évolution des sciences humaines. Les débats et controverses qui émaillent son histoire montrent non seulement l'impact pédagogique mais aussi les enjeux politiques.

Gerald A. Press - Platon: Penseur du visuel - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 487-488 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Gerald A. Press Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center Michail Maiatsky. Platon: Penseur du visuel. Commentaires philosophiques. Paris: l'Harmattan, 2005. Pp. 299. €25.50. Recent philosophers and cultural critics have written a new chapter in the long history of anti-Platonism, making Plato the (...) evil genius of a visual prejudice allegedly infecting the heart of Western metaphysics. Some find it contradictory that Plato expresses anti-visual thoughts but seems nevertheless deeply pro-visual; thus, his frequent use of visual language confuses his project. Others (the present reviewer.. (shrink)

Gerald A. Press - Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 167-168 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Gerald A. Press Hunter College and City University of New York Graduate Center James Lesher, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield, editors. Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006. Pp. xi + 446. Paper, $29.95. Plato's Symposium has (...) been a fertile source of philosophical, literary, and artistic inspiration for more than two thousand years. It continues to inspire debates amid the changing fashions in contemporary Plato interpretation. This volume of papers, which grew out of a conference at the Center for Hellenic Studies in 2005, is divided into four parts. Most of the papers are richly rewarding, but there is space here to do little more than hint at their main points. Part I, "The Symposium and.. (shrink)

The last few years have seen the emergence of a more political, ‘post-Derridean’ generation, critical of the impotent messianism of the politics of deconstruction. As Žižek would have it: ‘Derrida's notion of ‘deconstruction as ethics’ seems to rely on a utopian hope which sustains the spectre of ‘infinite justice’, forever postponed, always to come’ (Žižek 2008: 225). The promise of redemption, it follows, would reside in an insubstantial promissory value, in the writing of irredeemable cheques that, if cashed in, could (...) only ever lead to default. With its ethos of play and over-investment in an empty promise, deconstruction starts to look symptomatic of the now-bankrupt age of excess. Does the current financial crisis not entail a crisis of Derrida? This reading contrives to elide what is genuinely political in Derrida, and thereby fails to recognise the deconstruction of economic theodicy implicit in his work. Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that the concept of sacrifice is irreducibly linked to the short-circuiting of the political. We see in Derrida, however, that sacrifice is at the heart of politics, a response to undecidability that is precisely opposed to the fantasy of economics without sacrifice. Furthermore, sacrificial politics is the condition of possibility of the promise, which is constructed and contingent, rather than a priori. If there is a problem with this, it is that Derrida does not sufficiently entertain the prospect of the promise becoming so distant as to be effectively meaningless. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler, this article argues for an expansion of Derrida's account, to show not only that politics is sacrifice, but moreover that the promise of redemption cannot live on in the absence of sacrifice. (shrink)

La préoccupation de l'auteur est ici de démontrer qu'il est possible de conceptualiser une écriture du réel qui ne doit rien à ce que l'on entend communément par " réalité ". Si la réalité se définit comme " ce qui est ", le réel, lui, est hors monde, avant l'émergence du signifiant et du langage. Les études des oeuvres de Pierre Guyotat et de Bernard Réquichot soutiennent qu'une écriture est possible sans céder à une signification immédiate. Elle s'origine dans le (...) corps et se fabrique à partir d'un impensé dont la coloration est l'angoisse. Ce n'est donc pas un hasard si un rapport s'établit entre le trait de la lettre et la consistance d'un sujet. Deux extrêmes fondent ce rapport : les premiers signes écrits des grottes préhistoriques et la production esthétique rencontrée dans la clinique de la psychose. De tout cela, il ressort une théorie du sujet qui doit plus à une ontologie de l'accident qu'à une permanence de l'être. (shrink)

It has been shown that for the Reissner-Nordström solution to the vacuum Einstein field equations charge, like mass, has a unique space-time signature (Marsh, Found. Phys. 38:293–300, 2008). The presence of charge results in a negative curvature. This work, which includes a discussion of effective mass, is extended here to the Kerr-Newman solution.

Charge, like mass in Newtonian mechanics, is an irreducible element of electromagnetic theory that must be introduced ab initio. Its origin is not properly a part of the theory. Fields are then defined in terms of forces on either masses—in the case of Newtonian mechanics, or charges in the case of electromagnetism. General Relativity changed our way of thinking about the gravitational field by replacing the concept of a force field with the curvature of space-time. Mass, however, remained an irreducible (...) element. It is shown here that the Reissner-Nordström solution to the Einstein field equations tells us that charge, like mass, has a unique space-time signature. (shrink)

Excepting the first half of Athēnaiōn Politeia, whose authorship remains controversial, there are no works of historical inquiry in the Aristotelian corpus. This contributes to the impression that Aristotle’s political theory abstracts from history. This judgment is reinforced by statements in the Poetics diminishing history and historians in favor of poetry and the poets. I offer a more nuanced interpretation, relying principally on an intertextual reading of the Athēnaiōn Politeia and Book Five of the Politics. Both texts direct the reader’s (...) attention to history, though in dramatically different ways. I argue that Aristotle’s uses of history are essential to his conversational engagements with the narratives that human beings construct in order to make sense of their experiences and to clarify options for choice. Read in a dialogic spirit, these texts underscore the possibilities and hazards of civic agency and preserve the importance of history, as well as poetry, for Aristotle’s political theory. (shrink)

Exceptuada la primera mitad de la Athēnaiōn Politeia, cuya autoría sigue siendo discutida, no hay obras de investigación histórica en el corpus aristotélico. Esto fortalece la impresión de que la teoría política aristotélica se abstrae de la historia. Esta opinión es reforzada por las afirmaciones contenidas en la Poética, que atenúan la importancia de la historia y los historiadores en favor de la poesía y los poetas. Esta contribución ofrece una interpretación más matizada, que se apoya sobre todo en una (...) lectura intertextual de la Athēnaiōn Politeia y el libro 5 de la Política. Ambos textos dirigen la atención del lector hacia la historia, pero en una manera completamente diferente. En este artículo argumento que los usos que hace Aristóteles de la historia son fundamentales para sus intercambios dialógicos con las narraciones que los seres humanos construyen para dar sentido a sus experiencias y aclarar sus opciones a la hora de elegir. Si se leen en este espíritu dialógico, estos textos resaltan las posibilidades y los riesgos de la acción política y salvaguardan la importancia tanto de la historia como de la poesía para la teoría política aristotélica. Palabras-clave: historia, poesía, ciencias sociales, teoría política. (shrink)