In this paper, I reference a Paradigm Case Core Conception of Violence, which each individual has, and can share with others to various degrees. This is shown to imply that because we cannot get at violence itself, and can only interpret violence in relationships that involve humans, we cannot avoid politicizing our conceptions of violence in our empathic, intersubjective relationships. This is demonstrated by outlining various claims concerning violence, and by utilizing Edith Stein's phenomenological account on empathy and intersubjectivity, and (...) Alfred Schütz’s characterizations of commonsense constructs and typicalities, as well as theorists who define violence in reductive and non-reductive ways. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that there is an agreed upon commonsense view of violence, but beyond this view, definitions for kinds of violence are essentially contested and non-neutrally, politically ideological, given that the political itself is an essentially contested concept defined in relation to ideologies that oppose one another. The first chapter outlines definitions for a commonsense view of violence produced by Greene and Brennan. This chapter argues that there are incontestable instances of violence that are almost universally agreed upon, such (...) as when an adult intentionally smashes a child’s head against a table, purposefully causing harm. It is also claimed that, because political, ideological distinctions between kinds of violence arise from the creation of moral equivalences to the commonsense view of violence, political ideology is the source of disagreement. The second chapter argues that the concept of violence and of the political are essentially contested concepts. Gallie’s criteria for what counts as an essentially contested concept are utilized in order to argue that violence is an essentially contested concept at the level of the political, though not at the level of the commonsense view of violence. In fact, the paradigmatic cases that the commonsense view of violence pertains to serve as the core cases that are then interpreted as kinds of violence at the ideological level. To define violence as altogether wrong, or to define kinds of violence as acceptable and others as wrong is itself a politically ideological move to make, such as when liberalism defines its own uses of violence as justified and legitimate, and its enemy’s violence as unjustifiable and illegitimate. The World Health Organization and Bufacchi’s definitions for violence are presented, as are the definition for terroristic violence defined by Nagel. Erlenbusch’s critique of a liberal view, such as that of Nagel and the World Health Organization, is addressed as a reflection on the fact that, beyond the commonsense view of violence, violence is an essentially contested concept for which an ideologically, politically non-neutral definition is unlikely. The third chapter outlines numerous definitions produced by various philosophers, historians, and theorists, such as Machiavelli, Arendt, Hobbes, Kant, Treitschke, Weber, Bakunin, Sorel, Žižek, and Benjamin. The definitions produced by each demonstrates that person’s political ideological assumptions. Their definitions demonstrate an ongoing disagreement, in the sense of Rancière’s formulation for what counts as a disagreement in that each theorist defines kinds of violence under the yoke of their own political ideology. They all might agree that a single act is violent, under the commonsense view of violence, but they disagree concerning what kind of violence it is. So, though they may point to the same events and actions as examples of violence, what they mean fundamentally differs, and this means that they disagree. Their disagreement arises due to their respective political ideologies. This disagreement shows that there is no neutral justification for the neutrality of a state, particularly if a neutral state must defend itself. The state is instead defined in historically contextual terms of how the state relates to kinds of violence, and the distinctions between kinds of violence are not themselves politically, ideologically neutral. So, the concept of violence, beyond the commonsense view, is an essentially contested concept for which a non-neutral definition is unlikely. Beyond the commonsense view, political ideology is inextricably bound up within distinctions between kinds of violence. The fourth chapter then examines arguments on the question of whether nonviolence counts as a kind of violence. If distinctions between kinds of violence are essentially contested and non-neutrally defined, and nonviolence is defined as distinct from violence, then it follows that nonviolence is an essentially contested concept for which no non-neutral definition is possible, at least beyond a commonsense view of nonviolence. A commonsense view of nonviolence is defined as the assumption that nonviolence is not violent in the way that the commonsense view defines violence. That is, nonviolence occurs when there is no action or event that most people would define as a violent one. Definitions for nonviolence, civil disobedience, nonviolent political actions, and nonviolent direct actions are then outlined. These definitions aim at showing that the doctrine of nonviolence does not merely refer to nonviolent acts, but to a strategy that is a means to defeating violence. Given that what counts as the nonviolence that defeats violence is ideologically a matter of disagreement, nonviolence, in this sense, can count as a kind of violence. The fifth chapter concludes, raising questions concerning how violence can be valued, the degree to which a state cannot neutrally justify its neutrality, and the degree to which, beyond the commonsense view of violence, there ever could be agreement concerning what counts as kinds of violence. 1 In this dissertation, I draw on a number of ideas/passages that appeared earlier in my paper “The Efficacy of Scapegoating and Revolutionary Violence," in Philosophy, Culture, and Traditions: A Journal of the World Union of Catholic Philosophical Societies, ed. William Sweet, 10(2014), 203-219. I am grateful to the editors of the journal for permission to draw on this material here. (shrink)

Catholic Social Teaching takes a rather cautious view toward the value of the ideas of Adam Smith, due to his emphasis on negative political and economic liberty. Detractors of Smith within CST point to what they consider to be deficiencies within his works: an impoverished moral anthropology, a lack of concern for the common good, and markets untethered to human needs. Defenders of Smith within CST tend to emphasize the material benefits that derive from Smithian institutions, such as economic growth, (...) improvements in standards of living, and the new opportunities that arise from cultures focused on innovation. This paper argues that Smith’s ideas have real value for CST. However, this value primarily lies in his moral psychology. While not denying the dangers of business activity for our moral lives, Smith also helps us to understand the possibility of the moral corruption of those who wield political power, thus providing an indirect defense of political and economic liberty that coheres with important Christian ethical notions found in CST. This is the case even though CST does not consistently recognize concerns surrounding the dangers of wielding political power—and thus Smith’s arguments offer real challenges to CST as well. This paper further suggests that these basic insights are relevant regardless of one’s favored institutional arrangements. (shrink)

Gregory Fried offers in this book a careful investigation of Martin Heidegger's understanding of politics. Disturbing issues surround Heidegger's commitment to National Socialism, his disdain for liberal democracy, and his rejection of the Enlightenment. Fried confronts these issues, focusing not on the historical debate over Heidegger's personal involvement with Nazism, but on whether and how the formulation of Heidegger's ontology relates to his political thinking as expressed in his philosophical works. The inquiry begins with Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus, particularly (...) the term polemos ("war," or, in Heidegger's usage, "confrontation"). Fried contends that Heidegger invests polemos with broad ontological significance and that his appropriation of the word provides important insights into major strands of his thinking--his conception of the human being, understanding of truth, and interpretation of history--as well as the meaning of the so-called turn in his thought. Although Fried finds that Heidegger's politics are continuous with his thought, he also argues that Heidegger's work raises important questions about contemporary identity politics. Fried also shows that many postmodernists, despite attempts to distance themselves from Heidegger, fail to avoid some of the same political pitfalls his thinking entailed. (shrink)

Either beauty is the beholding of a fixed and final aesthetic essence discontinuous with the rest of nature, or it is an intuitive grasp and encompassing feel of a consummated movement of natural energies and elements through their inner relations into a single, qualitative unity, whose pervasive tonality is a situational emergent from the biologically active, temporally continuous, and reciprocally constituting-constituted transactional dialectic between a human creature and the world. If aesthetic-mystical experience is indeed something “eternalized” out of all connection (...) with ordinary experience and the flood of moving fact, then what is immediately entailed is a phenomenological profile conceived as.. (shrink)

Role models can be highly influential in conveying ethical standards. This study investigates the influence various categories of role models have had on a population of over 1,600 undergraduate students in Texas, Oregon and Michigan. Those identifying clergy, boy scout leaders, friends and college advisors as role models exhibited less willingness to adopt questionable ethical behavior in negotation situations. Journalist and spouse role models tended to cause students to be more accepting of questionable behavior. Individuals with strong end-result and social (...) contract ethical philosophies, as well as males and those who served in the military exhibited strong tendencies toward less than ethical behavior. Individuals with strong rule ethical philosophy, high levels of religiousity, and those with a cooperative attitude in negotiations tended to adopt higher ethical standards in negotiations. (shrink)

Gregory Landini offers a detailed historical account of Frege's notations and the philosophical views that led Frege from Begriffssscrhrift to his mature work Grundgesetze, addressing controversial issues that surround the notations.

According to Thomas Aquinas, the ideas in the mind of God serve two distinct although interrelated roles: (1) as epistemological principles accounting for God’s knowledge of things other than himself, and (2) as ontological or causal principles involved in God’s creative activity. This article examines the causal role of the divine ideas by focusing on their relation to natural agents. Given Thomas’s observation that from God’s intellect “forms flow forth (effluunt) into all creatures,” the article considers whether the causality of (...) the divine ideas excludes that of natural agents, or whether both modes of causality can somehow produce one and the same effect. (shrink)

Although the ability to perform gene therapy in human germ-line cells is still hypothetical, the rate of progress in molecular and cell biology suggests that it will only be a matter of time before reliable clinical techniques will be within reach. Three sets of arguments are commonly advanced against developing those techniques, respectively pointing to the clinical risks, social dangers and better alternatives. In this paper we analyze those arguments from the perspective of the client-centered ethos that traditionally governs practice (...) in medical genetics. This perspective clarifies the merits of these arguments for geneticists, and suggests useful new directions for the professional discussion of germ-line gene therapy. It suggests, for example, that the much discussed prospect of germ-line therapy in human pre-embryos may always be more problematic for medical genetics than adult germ-line interventions, even though the latter faces greater technical difficulties. (shrink)

Depending on how one construes the Greek at Apology at 30b2-4, Socrates says either that money and everything else good for men comes from virtue or that money and everything else becomes good for men because of virtue. I defend the first option (which is agreed to be the more natural construal) against arguments (from Burnet, Taylor and Burnyeat) that it commits Socrates to something he could not have held.

Derrida defines différance as the “interruption of Hegelian dialectics.” Although scholars have noted that Derrida pursues his critique of Hegel by means of Hegelian concepts, the way that Derrida employs specific Hegelian concepts in his critique, such as non-positionality, self-reference, and contradiction, has not been sufficiently investigated. In this essay, I reconstruct Derrida’s critique of Hegel with special focus on the Hegelian concepts of non-positionality, self-reference, and contradiction.

Anaximander, the sixth-century BCE philosopher of Miletus, is often credited as being the instigator of both science and philosophy. The first recorded philosopher to posit the idea of the boundless cosmos, he was also the first to attempt to explain the origins of the world and humankind in rational terms. Anaximander's philosophy encompasses theories of justice, cosmogony, geometry, cosmology, zoology and meteorology. Anaximander: A Re-assessment draws together these wide-ranging threads into a single, coherent picture of the man, his worldview and (...) his legacy to the history of thought. Arguing that Anaximander's statements are both apodeictic and based on observation of the world around him, Andrew Gregory examines how Anaximander's theories can all be construed in such a way that they are consistent with and supportive of each other. This includes the tenet that the philosophical elements of Anaximander's thought (his account of the apeiron, the extant fragment) can be harmonised to support his views on the natural world. The work further explores how these theories relate to early Greek thought and in particular conceptions of theogony and meterology in Hesiod and Homer. (shrink)

Recent controversy over the existence of biological laws raises questions about the cognitive aims of theoretical modeling in that science. If there are no laws for successful theoretical models to approximate, then what is it that successful theories do? One response is to regard theoretical models as tools. But this instrumental reading cannot accommodate the explanatory role that theories are supposed to play. Yet accommodating the explanatory function, as articulated by Brandon and Sober for example, seems to involve us once (...) again in a reliance on laws. The paper concludes that we must rethink both the nature of laws and theoretical explanation in biology. (shrink)

John Perry has devoted most of his recent work to the development of what he calls a reflexive– referential theory of utterance content. The theory has two main motivations. The primary purpose of the theory was to offer a new solution in the old controversy between referentialists and descriptivists. The second application of the theory, emphasized in the recent collaboration with Kepa Korta, is to yield a satisfactory compromise in the contemporary debate between minimalists and contextualists. The key idea is (...) that, by acknowledging that any utterance conveys not a single content but a plurality of contents, we can do justice to the intuitions and arguments put forward by all descriptivists, referentialists, minimalists and contextualists at once. The theory recognizes two different kinds of contents, referential and reflexive. The referential content of an utterance u containing a proper name or an indexical expression involves an individual, as the referentialist urges; and, as the contextualist claims, usually that referential content plays the role of what is said by u. In addition to this referential content, u also conveys a variety of other contents: reflexive contents. Each of these corresponds to a different content about u itself, given different facts about u. Perry treats the various reflexive contents of u as descriptive contents, and argues, on behalf of the descriptivist, that some of these capture the cognitive value of utterances like u containing referential terms. Finally, and to pacify the minimalist, one of the reflexive contents of u corresponds to a minimal content, determined independently of context, in virtue of linguistic conventions alone. This paper offers a critical survey of the reflexive–referential theory, highlights its merits, and also points to some of its potential weaknesses. (shrink)

J. Baird Callicott suggests in “The Land Aesthetic“ that the environmental community would be well served to focus on the aesthetic value of natural ecosystems as a source of intrinsic value in nature. But Callicott's own Humean and biological account of aesthetic value is inadequate as a basis for understanding the aesthetic appreciation of nature. This paper argues that John Dewey provides a holistic and transactional account of aesthetic value that is easily tailored to fit the ecocentric requirements of a (...) rich environmental aesthetics. (shrink)

Asked to characterize the critical history of cinema studies over the past several decades, one could do much worse than to speak of the age of affect of affect.1 This is a big claim, of course, but it’s not without precedent or parallel. The engagement with affect describes a remarkably widespread shift in the humanities, social sciences, and the neurosciences. Cinema studies is among a number of disciplines that have sought to prioritize matters of sensation and feeling, and for roughly (...) the past thirty years the persistence of affect has played a critical role in the field. In the historicist recovery of the “cinema of attractions” and the feminist reappraisal of film melodrama, in the cognitivist... (shrink)

Nevin & Grace invoke a behavioral metaphor from the physics of momentum. The idealized assumptions they invoke are argued to translate to behavior only in the limited case of steady-state, constant-probability VI responding. Rather than further refine this limit case, mathematical models should be applied to generalizations of the limit case itself, broadening our understanding of behavioral processes.

The concepts of inquiry, reasonableness, open-mindedness, critical thinking, creativity, caring, self-correction and democracy, as they relate to the community of philosophical inquiry practiced in Philosophy for Children, are analyzed in terms of behaviors, procedures and habits.

1. Hegel’s Doctrine of the Concept advances a theory of conceptual determinacy. As I will demonstrate, Hegel’s theory of conceptual determinacy leads him to endorse self-predication and existential...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Grayson Douglas Browning (1929–2023)Gregory Pappas, David Hildebrand, and William T. MyersBrowning, Grayson Douglas was born on March 7, 1929, in Seminole, Oklahoma.He received his PhD from the University Texas, Austin, 1958, where he returned later in 1972 to become its Philosophy Department chairman for four years.He was president of the Southwestern Philosophical Association in 1977, of the Florida Philosophical Association in 1967, and of the Southern Society (...) for Philosophy and Psychology in 1972.He was not only a member of the Society for Advancement of America Philosophy; he encouraged all of his students to attend and become members of this society. Among these former students are Bill Myers, David Hildebrand, and Gregory Pappas.He thought that this was one of the best societies, not only because of its pluralism and scholarship, but because it was a community. He was right!He was the author of several books of philosophy, including Act and Agent and Ontology and the Practical Arena, and he co-edited Philosophers of Process (with William T. Myers). He also has published poetry in Voices, A Journal of Poetry and the Beloit Poetry Journal.In the last years of his life, Doug Browning was a retired Professor of Philosophy, living outside Georgetown, Texas, where he labored at length over poems and novels, staying up throughout the night reading, writing, listening to jazz, and smoking cigars, and enjoying life in his countryside hacienda with his beautiful wife, Becky. During that time, he managed to write and publish sixteen books of fiction. [End Page 106]For us (his former students), one of the most important philosophical contributions of Doug Browning was his insistence that if there is a key lesson from American Philosophy, it is the importance of lived experience ("La Vida") as the "starting point" of philosophical investigation.As he wrote in one of his last published essays:[T]he point is that, wherever one thinks we should start, we can't start with the world. We can't start with the world and we can't test our theories by testing them against the world. Whatever we take to indicate or to provide evidence of a "real" world apart from experience must be found, can only be found, in experience. It must be found in the glass of Barrilito, the aroma of a good cigar, conversation among friends, hotel hallways, cats, thunderstorms, oak trees, and all of the brazen and all of the unpretentious things that we encounter and live among in our day-to-day lives.1Gregory PappasTexas A&M UniversityDavid HildebrandUniversity of Colorado DenverWilliam T. MyersBirmingham-Southern Collegenote1. Douglas Browning, "Dewey and Ortega on the Starting Point," Pragmatism in the Americas, edited by Gregory Fernando Pappas (Fordham UP, 2011), p. 155.Copyright © 2024 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Cheerful Resignation Self‐Sufficiency Murphy was an Optimist: Negative Visualization Agency and Control Fate, Freedom, and Sailing.

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, appeal to ridicule. An appeal to ridicule is closely related to an ad hominem argument because both attack the person. There is a similarity between an appeal to ridicule and an appeal to emotion in that both attempt to bypass rational assessment of a point of view and elicit an emotional reaction from the audience. An appeal to ridicule may be an attempt to elicit humor at another's expense, (...) or it may be an attempt to elicit enmity, playing on the fears and prejudices of the group. The difference between a reductio ad absurdum and an appeal to ridicule is that the former uses good evidence while the latter does not. Perhaps the best way to avoid this fallacy is to cultivate an attitude of respect for other points of view. (shrink)

In Black Museum, a young woman is out to take revenge on the man who imprisoned her father's digital self in a museum exhibit that allows sadistic visitors to reenact his execution. While the exhibit is morally detestable and some may think that the museum's curator gets what he deserves in the end, the woman's act of vengeance is morally disturbing. This chapter explores Martha Nussbaum's account of anger and forgiveness and considers Christian and Buddhist teachings. An argument by David (...) Kyle Johnson for the moral permissibility of revenge under certain circumstances is considered and rejected. The authors conclude that the act of revenge in Black Museum is not morally justified. (shrink)

Résumé Bien que la documentation cunéiforme du Proche-Orient ancien soit composée essentiellement de textes administratifs, rédigés par les palais, les temples ou des particuliers, les pratiques de comptes en tant que telles ne suscitent en général pas l’intérêt des assyriologues. Ces derniers préfèrent traditionnellement subordonner leur étude à l’histoire quantitative ou bien à l’analyse archivistique. Pourtant, le programme d’histoire concrète de l’abstraction proposé par Jean-Claude Perrot invite à enquêter sur cet objet historique dans la perspective d’une histoire totale, où l’économique (...) pourrait expliquer le social et le politique. Il s’agit de mener de front, d’une part, une démarche réflexive sur la conception de la comptabilité par les historiens mais également par les professionnels des sciences de gestion, et d’autre part, une approche émique qui prendrait en considération les modes d’intellection, le rapport à la matérialité et les motivations d’ordre social et politique des Anciens. (shrink)

One might expect that empiricists would be hostile to religion. Religions are customarily based on belief in an occult realm, a realm of gods, spirits, demons, and mysterious forces. This realm is inaccessible to sense perception, which empiricists regard as our only source of knowledge. One can, however, distinguish between empiricism as a doctrine and empiricism as a stance. A liberal kind of doctrinal empiricism will allow for inferences to unobservable entities, which may also fall within the scope of empiricism (...) as a stance. Inferences to the existence of God would be of this kind, although they are unlikely to attain the standards expected in the sciences. Those who reject inferences to unobservable entities, on the other hand, will reject some (but not necessarily all) forms of “natural theology.” Empiricist assessments of religious claims will need to take into account two further facts: firstly, that they form “webs of belief” and, secondly, that they are often thought to be based on a distinct source of knowledge, namely the act of faith. (shrink)

This edited volume is the first systematic philosophical investigation of the complex and multifarious relationships between dreaming and memory. Featuring fifteen contributions by leading researchers, it explores a range of issues that arise when dreaming and memory are considered together. What does one remember when one remembers what one dreamt, and what is it for a memory of a dream to be accurate? What are the phenomenological, cognitive, and epistemic similarities and dissimilarities between dreaming and remembering? How does the self (...) figure in dreams and memories? The book will serve as an indispensable resource both for philosophers interested in dreaming or memory and for their philosophically-minded colleagues in empirical disciplines and will provide an invaluable starting point for advanced students in need of a snapshot of the state of the art in philosophical research on dreaming and memory. Chapters [2], [10], and [16] are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Non‐Darwinian Revolution 1870–1880: The Struggle for Existence and Cultural Evolution 1880–1882: Nietzsche contra Spencer 1883–1888: The Will to Power as Bildungstrieb Conclusion.

English translation of Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Psalms, Psalm 8.

This essay identifies and examines three theses about collective responsibility which are frequently assumed or presupposed in philosophical discussions of collective responsibility. While the first thesis places constraints upon what counts as collective responsibility in a way which is plausible and defensible, It is argued that the constraints placed by theses two and three are unreasonably limiting.