Drevnyaya Indiya, Jazyk - Kul'tura - Tekst. Ed. G.M. Bongard-Levin, V.V. Vertogradova and S.V. Kullanda. Nauka Publishers, Central Department of Oriental Literature, Moscow 1985. 268 pp.

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual virtues, (...) editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.3 (2006) 467-468 [Access article in PDF] Richard Hunter. Plato's "Symposium". New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 150. Cloth, $40.00. Paper, $14.95. The editors of the series in which Plato's "Symposium" appears state that its constituent texts are to be "essays in criticism and interpretation that will do justice to the subtlety and complexity of the works under discussion" (vi). (...) In the preface, Hunter identifies as his audience "those who have already read or are in the process of reading the Symposium" (ix).Plato's "Symposium" has much to offer to classics students and to the general reader. The book provides useful literary and cultural background regarding the conduct of Greek symposia (5–15). It is filled with valuable interpretive remarks, as for example when Hunter proposes that Alcibiades' depiction of Socrates "as a carved Silenus" instantiates a "common form of sympotic verbal game, the 'likeness'—'Why is X (usually one of the symposiasts) like Y (usually something nonhuman)?'" (5–6). Hunter's rich knowledge of Greek literature pays off in a range of ways, as for instance in his remarks on literary articulations of erôs (16–18). The volume's final chapter, on the history of the dialogue's reception, offers a number of figures and contexts on which to reflect.Hunter makes helpful observations regarding the seriocomic and special features of Plato's recourse to it (9–11), noting that, "in the attack upon the spoudaiogeloion, it is the spoudaiogeloion itself which is the principal weapon" (36). Hunter's orientation in this regard yields nuanced interpretations of the logoi of Pausanias and Eryximachus. Hunter observes helpfully that Aristophanes' encomium functions as "an example of a very familiar aspect of the technique of Aristophanic comedy, namely, the literalization of metaphorical language (as, for example, when 'weighing up' poetry becomes a matter of real weighing in the Frogs)" (65). In Hunter's view, Agathon's contribution, in turn, illustrates Plato's contention in the Gorgias that tragedy is a type of flattery (kolakeia). Drawing on Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmophoria, Hunter makes the useful suggestion that the comic poet's depiction "can... help to explain the extravagance of the Platonic character's speech" (76).While Plato's "Symposium" will also provide valuable background to students of philosophy, on its own the book does not do justice to Socrates' encomium, in particular the crucial "ascent passage" (210a–12a). A key point of contention among philosophical interpreters of the Symposium is whether one is to read the ascent passage as "inclusive" or "exclusive" regarding erôs as directed toward individuals. (For the formulation of the controversy in these terms, see J. M. E. Moravcsik, "Reason and Eros in the 'Ascent'-Passage of the Symposium," in Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, eds. Anton and Kustas [1971], 293.) The strongly exclusivist stance has had a number of exponents and is most famously associated with Gregory Vlastos (see "The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato," in Platonic Studies, 2nd ed. [1981], 31). For a contrasting view, one may consult, for example, John Brentlinger, according to whom "it does not follow from Plato's claim that we love persons (or anything else) because we believe them to be beautiful and good, that we really love the properties of beauty and goodness per se, and do not really love persons per se" (The "Symposium" of Plato [1970], 122; see also C. J. Rowe, Plato: "Symposium" [1998], 7). Hunter states that the Symposium's "apparent rejection of the value of lasting love between individuals has often seemed to modern readers to present a harshly intellectual view of erôs which ignores basic, [End Page 467] universal facts of human experience and which offers little comfort to all but a Socrates" (98). It will not, I think, be evident to readers not already familiar with pertinent philosophical literature on the ascent to just what interpretive debate this remark is (at most) a glancing gesture.Hunter quotes Symposium 210d, where Plato says that the... (shrink)

Inquiring 'whether any war can be just', Thomas Aquinas famously responded that this may hold true, provided the war is conducted by a legitimate authority, for a just cause, and with an upright intention. Virtually all accounts of just war, from the Middle Ages to the current day, make reference to this threefold formula. But due in large measure to its very succinctness, Aquinas's theory has prompted contrasting interpretations. This book sets the record straight by surveying the wide range of (...) texts in his literary corpus that have bearing on peace and the ethics of war. Thereby emerges a coherent and nuanced picture of just war as set within his systematic moral theory. It is shown how Aquinas deftly combined elements from earlier authors, and how his teaching has fruitfully propelled inquiry on this important topic by his fellow scholastics, later legal theorists such as Grotius, and contemporary philosophers of just war. (shrink)

The publication of Daniel Lehrman’s 1953 paper, “A Critique of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior,” (_The Quarterly Review of Biology_ 28(4):337–363) exposed a gulf between comparative psychologists and ethologists regarding the concept of instincts. At the center of this debate was a rivalry between T. C. Schneirla—Lehrman’s doctoral advisor—and Konrad Lorenz. While Schneirla maintained that the concept of innate instincts mischaracterized developmental processes, Lorenz maintained that innateness was essential to understand the evolution of behavior. A year after the publication (...) of Lehrman’s paper, the Singer-Polignac Foundation organized a small conference where leaders in evolutionary biology, ethology, behavioral physiology, and comparative psychology met to discuss the concept of instinct and innateness. The result of this meeting was the publication of the book _L’instinct dans le comportement des animaux et de l’homme_ (M. Autuori et al. ( 1956 ) Masson, Paris) in which each conference participant submitted a chapter that was followed by a discussion among the participants. Here I review the historical context surrounding this conference with a republishing of the commentary on Schneirla’s chapter, “Interrelationships of the ‘Innate’ and the ‘Acquired’ in Instinctive Behavior.” Originally published in English, German, and French, the discussion is included here with a new translation into English for the first time. A companion article (this issue; G. M. Kohn (2024) “Revisiting T. C. Schneirla’s ‘Interrelationships of the “Innate” and the “Acquired” in Instinctive Behavior’ (1956)”) discusses and makes available Schneirla’s complete paper. (shrink)

Scientists must sometimes choose between competing definitions of key terms. The degree to which different definitions facilitate important discoveries should ultimately guide decisions about which terms to accept. In the short run, rules of thumb can help. One such rule is to regard with suspicion any definition that turns a seemingly important empirical matter into an a priori exercise. Several prominent definitions of ecological “stability” are suspect, according to this rule. After evaluating alternatives, I suggest that the faulty definitions resulted (...) from an overemphasis on population dynamics in community ecology. Machine metaphors of nature may have given rise to a related problem of experimental design. (shrink)

The Ethics of War is an indispensable collection of essays addressing issues both timely and age-old about the nature and ethics of war. Features essays by great thinkers from ancient times through to the present day, among them Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, Russell, and Walzer Examines timely questions such as: When is recourse to arms morally justifiable? What moral constraints should apply to military conduct? How can a lasting peace be achieved? Will appeal to a broad range of (...) readers interested in morality and ethics in war time Includes informative introductions and helpful marginal notes by editors. (shrink)

The mass extinction visited upon us by capitalism involves many kinds of devastation. Here I clarify the grounds for assessing the most obvious of these harms, i.e., decimation of species diversity. The thesis that variety among species has intrinsic value motivates, and in turn follows from, the “variable value view” (VVV) of abundance within any given species. In contrast, standard axiologies have no place for the intrinsic value of species diversity. I show that the VVV provides a better justification than (...) the latter do, of the way in which a widely-used empirical indicator summarizes the overall state of life on Earth. These considerations favor ecocentric value theory – which ascribes intrinsic value to properties of ecological wholes, like species diversity, that do not supervene on the well-being of their constituent organisms – over its main competitors. I conclude by widening the focus from wild nature alone to the biosphere comprising both wilderness and the domesticated realm. This broadened perspective helps to link the science and ethics of biodiversity with the political struggle to extract ourselves from the moral abyss of mass extinction. (shrink)

Richness theory offers an alternative to the paradigms that have dominated the short history of environmental ethics as a self-conscious field. This alternative theoretical paradigm defines intrinsic value as “richness”—a synonym for “organic unity” or “unity in diversity.” Richness theory can handily reconcile two kinds of ideas that seem to be in tension with each other:that (1) an individual human being has a greater worth than an individual organism of just about any other species; and (2) yet the world would (...) be a better place with substantially fewer humans and/or less consumption per capita, thus leaving more resources for other species.The mutual compatibility of such ideas within the framework of richness theory can be demonstrated both verbally and through a simplified mathematical model. (shrink)

Virtually all historical treatments of just war recognize the importance of the account given by Thomas Aquinas in Summa theologiae II-II, q. 40, ?De bello?, where he outlines three conditions ? legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention ? for a justifiable use of armed force. It is, however, less well known that within the same section of the work (q. 50, a. 4) Aquinas extended his reflection on just war into a theory of military prudence. By placing generalship under (...) the category of ?prudence?, rather than ?art? or ?science?, he held that military command involves more than a morally neutral skill with victory as its sole aim. Building on the premise that service to the common good constitutes the overarching purpose of the military profession, Aquinas showed how the virtue of prudence provides an inner compass for decision-making amid the uncertainty and confusion of the battlefield. (shrink)

This book argues that natural law - when construed as an epistemological and trans-cultural lingua franca, adjudged capable of legitimating the rational intelligibility and universal applicability of specific Christian moral principles within contemporary "secular" discourse - has failed. Through a detailed analysis of the contributions of three prominent natural law theorists who are located within a shared philosophical-theological tradition, namely, John Finnis, Jean Porter, and John Milbank, the text will seek to illuminate the extent to which this failure is as (...) much intramural as it is extramural. (shrink)

(2013). Malebranche and Chinese Philosophy: A Reconsideration. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 262-280. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.718869.

The question of this work is the relationship between cognition and self-knowledge. That question is approached both by way of Kant on apperception and from the perspective of contemporary theories of mind which locate the origin of our cognitive life in interpersonal, interpretive practices, e.g., Sellars, Davidson, Dennett and Brandom. Kant does not integrate the social dimension into his account of cognition. In fact, many of his arguments for the apperception principle are beholden to a picture of mind which precludes (...) his recognizing the social dimension of cognition. Nonetheless, one can reconstruct a Kantian argument for the apperception principle within the framework of a theory which recognizes the constitutive role of interpretation in cognition. ;Chapter One explores the various ways that the priority of interpersonal interpretation has been claimed. These range from analyses of our talk of the mind as descriptive-predictive strategies to functionalist theories of mind to theories which emphasize the connection between interpreting language and attributing propositional attitudes and the normative dimension of interpretation . Chapter Two outlines seven interpretive questions that any reading of Kant on apperception must address, questions about what Kant means by 'apperception' and the character of the apperception principle. Chapter Three is an analysis of those Kantian arguments for the apperception principle which picture the mind as a private arena, arguments which are untenable from the perspective established in Chapter One. Chapter Four explores Sydney Shoemaker's argument for a functionalist version of Kant's apperception principle and argues that his approach is unsatisfactory. Chapter Five introduces Robert Brandom's theory of propositional attitudes with a discussion of Sellars' theory of sentence meaning and Davidson on the relationship between belief and meaning. Chapter Six then looks at what difference the ability to attribute oneself a propositional attitude might make on Brandom's theory. I argue against Brandom that having a belief or an intention presupposes the ability to explicitly say that one has that belief or intention. Chapter Seven returns to Kant and argues that the analysis and conclusion of Chapter Six are broadly Kantian. (shrink)

During the inter war period, European Catholic authors exhibited two different approaches to the question of just war. One approach was articulated at the “Fribourg Conventus,” a 1931 meeting of French, Swiss, and German theologians, whose subsequent declaration (Conventus de bello, published in 1932) called for a reformulation of Catholic teaching based on the premise that the traditional just‐war doctrine had been superseded by developments in international law. A competing approach was articulated by the Dutch Jesuit Robert Regout, who maintained (...) that the just‐war doctrine could contribute to the formation of international law by providing a much‐needed normative foundation for the use of armed force by individual states in redress of their violated rights. After presenting these two approaches and explaining how they differ, this essay shows how the outlook of the Conventus de bello is reflected in subsequent papal statements on armed force—to the detriment of the traditional terminology of just war. (shrink)

During the postwar period, the concept of instinct came to encapsulate the debate around the importance of nature versus nurture. The fact that animals show highly organized behavior early in development suggested the presence of an underlying fixity where behavior was “inbuilt” into an animal’s biology despite an individual’s experiences. This placed a discrete and exhaustive line between the innate and acquired that became a foundation for the European-dominated field of ethology. Across the Atlantic, a group of comparative psychologists led (...) by the American Museum of Natural History’s T. C. Schneirla contested this approach, proposing that the study of animal behavior should avoid abstract dichotomies with a renewed focus on developmental processes. While Schneirla’s theoretical and empirical work shaped the modern study of animal behavior, his legacy requires revisiting in an era where the nature versus nurture debate is regaining prominence. In this article, I revisit Schneirla’s approach to behavior with a focus on his paper “Interrelationships of the ‘Innate’ and the ‘Acquired’ in Instinctive Behavior” (published in M. Autuori et al. (1956) _L’instinct dans le comportement des animaux et de l’homme_; Masson, Paris, pp. 387–452) for the journal’s “Classics in Biological Theory” collection; the paper is available as supplementary material in the online version of this article. A companion article (this issue; G. M. Kohn (2024) “A Discussion on Instinct, Paris, 1954”) presents the commentary that was published with it. (shrink)

As Jonathan Mann observed, the problem of AIDS-related stigma is inextricably bound to issues of health, human rights, and the law. Such stigma translates into feelings of fear and hostility directed at people with HIV. It finds expression in avoidance and ostracism of people with HIV, discrimination and violence against them, and public support for punitive policies and laws that restrict civil liberties while hindering AIDS prevention efforts. Being the target of stigma inflicts pain, isolation, and hardship on many people (...) with HIV, while the desire to avoid it deters some from being tested for HIV, seeking treatment, or practicing risk-reduction. (shrink)

When so much is being written on conscious experience, it is past time to face the question whether experience happens that is not conscious of itself. The recognition that we and most other living things experience non-consciously has recently been firmly supported by experimental science, clinical studies, and theoretic investigations; the related if not identical philosophic notion of experience without a subject has a rich pedigree. Leaving aside the question of how experience could become conscious of itself, I aim here (...) to demonstrate that the terms experience and consciousness are not interchangeable. Experience is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down, but I see non-conscious experience as based mainly in momentary sensations, relational between bodies or systems, and probably common throughout the natural world. If this continuum of experience — from non-conscious, to conscious, to self-transcending awareness — can be understood and accepted, radical constructivism (the “outside” world as a construct of experience) will gain a firmer foundation, panexperientialism (a living universe) may gain credibility, and psi will find its medium. (shrink)