This fascinating study offers a complete interpretation of the philosophies of both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. It finds in Nietzsche's philosophy an expression of the scepticism and relativism of the modern world to which he gave the name «nihilism.» If Nietzsche's conclusion that «there is no truth» poses the basic problematic of modernity, Professor Martin understands Wittgenstein's philosophy as addressing, in a radically new way, the overcoming of this nihilism. Martin offers a new interpretation of Wittgenstein's life work as focusing on (...) «the groundlessness of the human situation» and as restoring «truth» to its legitimate place within the conventions of language. The final chapter explores the spiritual implications for modern man of seeing clearly «the limits» of human language. (shrink)

152 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:1 JANUARY 1996 knowing." Absolute knowing is "the human community's coming to a reflective nonmetaphysical understanding of what it must take as authoritative grounds for belief and action..." . Since this involves us in a continuous dialectic, dialectic "does not end in absolute knowing; it begins the task of renewing itself" . From Hegel we get "a new paradigm for philosophy..." . The final chapter offers an account of the Philosophy of Right, and (...) takes up the question of the nature of the institutionalized structure of our modern social space. This account focuses on the ambiguity of "rights" and of "autonomy" and the conflicts that these ambiguities foster. Pinkard offers a penetrating and useful analysis of our modern social and political existence. Pinkard's treatment of the relativist questions arising from such a historicist posi- tion deserves our attention. The book also offers a very clear statement of a "nonmetaphysicar' perspective on Hegel. Finally, if Hegelian philosophy is "open" as Pinkard argues, then the relevance of Hegel for our present human condition is unquestionable; for we have our own social space to examine, a social space that has developed since Hegel. The dialectic, as Pinkard understands it to work -- that is, very differently from the mystified, metaphysicalized, dogmatic understanding the text- book versions have given us -- is our most powerful tool in coming to.. (shrink)

Nishitani was a Japanese student attending Heidegger's Freiburg lectures on Nietzsche's nihilism in the late 1930s. As a young thinker he absorbed western philosophy and literature, focusing especially on the growing tide of nineteenth- and twentieth-century voices expressing the collapse of traditional Western values and the advent of nihilism. Recognizing that the phenomenon of nihilism encompasses our human situation in a way that transcends any particular cultural tradition, the self-overcoming of nihilism became fundamental to his lifetime philosophical project. A progressively (...) deepening understanding of the role of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition in comprehending the possibility of a breakthrough beyond nihilism culminated in the 1961 publication of what may be Nishitani's magnum opus: Religion and Nothingness. (shrink)

Significant research attention has been devoted to understanding the ethical behavior of leaders (i.e., the moral person) and how leaders’ expectations influence their followers’ ethical behavior (...

David Hamilton is a leader in the American institutionalist school of heterodox economics that emerged after WWII. This volume includes 25 articles written by Hamilton over a period of nearly half a century. In these articles he examines the philosophical foundations and practical problems of economics. The result of this is a unique institutionalist view of how economies evolve and how economics itself has evolved with them. Hamilton applies insight gained from his study of culture to send the message that (...) human actions situated in culture determine our economic situation. David Hamilton has advanced heterodox economics by replacing intellectual concepts from orthodox economics that hinder us with concepts that help us. In particular, Hamilton has helped replace equilibrium with evolution, make-believe with reality, ideological distortion of government with practical use of government, the economy as a product of natural law with the economy as a product of human law and, last, he has helped us replace the entrepreneur as a hero with the entrepreneur as a real person. These articles provide an alternative to the self-adjusting market. They provide an explanation of how the interaction of cultural patterns and technology determine the evolutionary path of the economic development of a nation. This is not a simple materialist depiction of economic history as some Marxists have advocated, instead Hamilton treats technology and culture as endogenous forces, embedded and inseparable from each other and therefore, economic development. This volume will be of most interest and value to professional economists and graduate students who are looking for an in-depth explanation of the origins and significance of institutional economics. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

The collected essays and consensus statements of the second round of the National Evangelical-Catholic Dialogue, and the second book of the series on Evangelicals and Catholics in dialogue. The essays address the Christian ideal of life lived in pursuit of the good that is God, and the witness and imitation of God's action in Christ, as a pathway to fruitful dialogue between Catholics and Evangelicals.

Ambition is a curiously neglected topic in ethics. It isn’t that philosophers have not discussed it. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Santayana and a number of others have discussed ambition. But it has seldom received more than a few paragraphs worth of analysis, in spite of the fact that ambition plays a central role in Western politics (one cannot be elected without it), and in spite of the fact that Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke and Rousseau each considered (...) it to be among the greatest threats to political security. The aim of this paper is to provide a long overdue analysis of ambition. The first part of the paper explores what ambition is. The second seeks to answer the question, “Is ambition a virtue or a vice?”. (shrink)

McBride, Glen Culture' and 'society' are words we use very loosely. We can find their exact meaning in dictionaries but usually don't, as the context of our sentences provides the information we need in our conversations. We know our societies are the huge group of people living in our city or nation. Our culture is the large range of behaviour we have learned in our society. It includes our food preferences, ways of dressing, our ceremonies for weddings and births (...) and the laws that structure our world, everything that we know from growing up in our family and society. (shrink)

t54 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:1 JANUARY 1996 the theme of play, the comparisons with Japanese and Chinese thought .would benefit from reflection on the psychological implications of Nietzsche's sense of"the innocence of becoming," emphasized, for example, by Joan Stambaugh in The Other Nietzsche. Finally, as I develop in my book From Nietzsche to Wittgenstein: The Problem of Truth and Nihilism in theModern WorM, Nietzsche's own understanding of his philosophical task was inseparable from the historical problem of nihilism (...) and its overcoming in the modern world. To portray him primarily as the great psychologist he surely was is to perhaps unduly minimize not only his philosophical self-understanding, but his philosophical significance for our own engagement with the problem of nihilism in the twentieth century. Yet in spite of such limitations, this book remains a masterpiece of its kind. GLEN T. MARTIN Radford University Edmund Husserl. Briefwechsel. H usserliana Dokumente II 1/1-1 o. Karl and Elisabeth Schuhmann, editors. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer, 1993. Cloth, $15oo.oo. Why should anyone interested in a philosopher's philosophy need to read that philoso- pher's correspondence? Is not curiosity about someone's personal liti: and character irrelevant to grasping the value and meaning of that person's thought? It is, of course, a basic philosophical issue to determine to what extent and for what reason the study of a.. (shrink)

This book offers an important study of Aristotle's theory of the sense-organs. It aims to answer two questions central to Aristotle's psychology and biology: why does Aristotle think we have sense-organs, and why does he describe the sense-organs in the way he does? The author looks at all the Aristotelian evidence for the five senses and shows how pervasively Aristotle's accounts of the sense-organs are motivated by his interest in form and function. The book also engages with the celebrated problem (...) of whether perception for Aristotle requires material changes in the perceiver. It argues that, surprisingly to the modern philosopher, nothing in Aristotle's description of the sense-organs requires us to believe in such changes. (shrink)

The Gouldian argument for evolutionary contingency found in Wonderful Life can be dissected into three premises: palaeontological, macro-evolutionary, and developmental. Discussions of evolutionary contingency have revolved primarily around the developmental. However, a shift in methodological practice and new palaeontological evidence subsequent to the book’s publication appears to threaten the palaeontological premise that asserts high Cambrian disparity, or, roughly, that morphological differences between the Cambrian species were high. This presents a prima facie problem: Did the Cambrian consist of enough anatomical variety (...) to fuel a different outcome upon a replay of the tape of life? I investigate the role that disparity plays in the Gouldian argument for evolutionary contingency and conclude that the reduced disparity view does not undermine the argument, per se. As for the macro-evolutionary premise, Gould never offers any explicit justification for the idea that species sorting was indiscriminate or ‘lottery-like’ (though he certainly gestures at it). Putting aside the exegetical, I consider certain empirical avenues for underwriting the macro-evolutionary premise and argue that the most plausible route is to appeal to the special status of mass extinctions, a move that is not entirely unfamiliar to macro-evolutionists. That is, mass extinctions can be good sources of contingency due to their being ‘chancy’ in at least three respects. In sum, I update the palaeontological and macro-evolutionary premises as to reconstrue the Gouldian argument for evolutionary contingency in its strongest form. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to advance understanding of intellectually virtuous honesty, by examining the relationship between a recent account of intellectual honesty and a recent account of intellectual transparency. The account of intellectual honesty comes from Nathan King, who adapts the work of Christian Miller on moral honesty, while the account of intellectual transparency comes from T. Ryan Byerly. After introducing the respective accounts, I identify four potential differences between intellectual honesty and intellectual transparency as understood by these (...) accounts. I then turn to the question of how to think about the relationship between these traits in light of these potential differences. I make the case that intellectual transparency can either be regarded as an exceptionally strong or ideal variety of intellectual honesty, or it can be regarded as a distinct virtue from intellectual honesty which is a more cardinal virtue than the latter. Along the way, I also note some places where a case can be made that Miller's and King's accounts of honesty and intellectual honesty are in need of refinement or clarification. (shrink)

Ethicists have tended to treat the psychology of attributing mental states to animals as an entirely separate issue from the moral importance of animals’ mental states. In this paper I bring these two issues together. I argue for two theses, one descriptive and one normative. The descriptive thesis holds that ordinary human agents use what are generally called phenomenal mental states to assign moral considerability to animals. I examine recent empirical research on the attribution of phenomenal states and agential states (...) to argue that phenomenal mental states are the primary factor, psychologically, for judging an animal to be morally considerable. I further argue that, given the role of phenomenal states in assigning moral considerability, certain theories in animal ethics will meet significant psychological resistance. The normative thesis holds that ethicists must take the psychology of attributing mental states into account when constructing moral ideals concerning animals. I draw from the literature in political philosophy on ideal and non-ideal theory to argue that non-ideal theories for animals must account for human psychology because—like current social and political conditions—human psychology limits the achievement of moral ideals. (shrink)

The term “mental illness” implies that persons with such illnesses are more likely to be dangerous to themselves and/or others than are persons without such illnesses. This is the source of the psychiatrist’s traditional social obligation to control “harm to self and/or others,” that is, suicide and crime. The ethical dilemmas of psychiatry cannot be resolved as long as the contradictory functions of healing persons and protecting society are united in a single discipline.Life is full of dangers. Our highly developed (...) consciousness makes us, of all living forms in the universe, the most keenly aware of, and the most adept at protecting ourselves from, dangers. Magic and religion are mankind’s earliest warning systems. Science arrived on the scene only about 400 years ago, and scientific medicine only 200 years ago. Some time ago I suggested that “formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic”.1We flatter and deceive ourselves if we believe that we have outgrown the apotropaic use of language .Many people derive comfort from magical objects , and virtually everyone finds reassurance in magical words . The classic example of an apotropaic is the word “abracadabra,” which The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines as “a magical charm or incantation having the power to ward off disease or disaster”. In the ancient world, abracadabra was a magic word, the letters of which were arranged in an inverted pyramid and worn as an amulet around the neck to protect the wearer against disease or trouble. One fewer letter appeared in each line of the pyramid, until only the letter “a” remained to form the vertex of the triangle. As …. (shrink)