Ostensibly a discussion about love, the debate in the Phaedrus also encompasses the art of rhetoric and how it should be practised. This new edition contains an introductory essay outlining the argument of the dialogue as a whole and Plato's arguments about rhetoric and eros in particular. The Introduction also considers Plato's style and offers an account of the reception of the dialogue from its composition to the twentieth century. A new Greek text of the dialogue is accompanied by a (...) select textual apparatus. The greater part of the book consists of a Commentary, which elucidates the text and makes clear how Plato achieves his philosophical and literary objectives. Primarily intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of ancient Greek literature and philosophy, it will also benefit scholars who want an up-to-date account of how to understand the text, argument, style and background of the work. (shrink)

We present two studies investigating the impact of causal perceptions and the moral emotions of anger, shame, and guilt on the justification of deviant workplace behavior. Study 1 tests our conceptual framework using a sample of undergraduate business students; Study 2 examines a population of practicing physicians. Results varied significantly between the two samples, suggesting that individual and contextual factors play an important role in shaping the perceptual and emotional processes by which individuals form reactions to undesirable affective workplace events. (...) Implications of these findings for the study of ethics, emotions, and attributions, as well as for promoting ethical behavior, are discussed. (shrink)

Religion is more than a matter of worshipping a deity or spirit. For many people, religion pervades every part of their lives and is not separated off into some purely private and personal realm. Religion is integral to many people's relationship with the wider world, an aspect of their dwelling among other beings - both human and other-than-human - and something manifested in the everyday world of eating food, having sex and fearing strangers. Food, Sex and Strangers offers alternative ways (...) of thinking about what religion involves and how we might better understand it. Drawing on studies of contemporary religions, especially among indigenous peoples, the book argues that religion serves to maintain and enhance human relationships in and with the larger-than-human world. Fundamentally, religion can be better understood through the ways we negotiate our lives than in affirmations of belief - and it is best seen when people engage in intimate acts with themselves and others. (shrink)

Responding to claims to the contrary, this essay shows how liberal education, the education of critical exposure, indoctrinates students into a style of belief and belief formation. It argues that a common liberal view about what constitutes freedom from indoctrination is precisely the form of indoctrination feared by many conservative communitarians. While I support the style and procedures of liberal education, I argue that we cannot excise all indoctrinating components from it by semantic, logical or epistemic analyses of what indoctrination (...) or education means. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s “Standing Vigil for the Day to Come” was a review of Roger Laporte’s novel, La Veille, published by Gallimard earlier that year. Although Laporte’s work never received the wide readership it deserved, Foucault held it in high esteem, praising it in his assessment as one of the “most original” and “most difficult” of his time and, subsequently, urging Derrida to read it. This article is most appropriately situated in the series of literary reviews Foucault composed between 1961 and (...) 1966, in which his marked attempts to understand the relationship between language and thought drew him to the works of Roussel, Klossowski, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, and, of course, Laporte. Foucault finds Laporte’s treatment of the subject-matter particularly satisfying because it provides a non-reductive account of thought and its relationship to language; thought is neither identical with nor distinct from language. Foucault sees Laporte as relying on an important Nietzschean insight that thought is both too funda- mental and too archaic to be reduced to philosophy or to require a Cartesian ego. In this way La Veille is naturally of interest to Foucault because it deals with the relationship of a writer to an anonymous other; it is this other — not the writer — that makes writing possible. With the role of the subject de-emphasized, Foucault finds in Laporte a starting point for talking about language in contemporary literature and thought in post- Cartesian philosophy. (shrink)

With gripping archival detail, The Logic of Hatred scrutinizes the witch hunts and the Great Terror during the French Revolution to elaborate a theory and critique of what Jacob Rogozinski names the persecution apparatus. When this process is set into motion, sovereign power excludes and persecutes minoritized groups of humans deemed unworthy of inclusion, ultimately annihilating them. The author’s purpose is to break the seemingly inexorable cycle.

Animals are commonplace in genomic research, yet to date there has been little direct interrogation of the position, role and construction of animals in the otherwise flourishing social science of genomics. Following a brief discussion of this omission, I go on to suggest that there is much of interest for the social sciences and the humanities in this field of science. I show that animal genomics not only updates and extends established debates about the use of animals in science and (...) society, but also raises novel issues and promotes new ways of thinking about what animals are, and the social and biological relationships between animals and humans. Organising the science of interest into six themes (sameness, difference and classification; crossing boundaries; the maintenance of borders; farmyard supermodels; laboratory supermodels; knowing, relating and looking at animals), for each I review some of the science that is being done, some of the conceptual issues that are raised, and some of the social science that is or could be done. I conclude by briefly considering the development of socially responsive policies for animal genomics. (shrink)

This book discusses Ramon Llull (ca. 1232-1316), the Christian missionary, philosopher and mystic, his relations with Jewish contemporaries, and how he ...

In this contribution, I plumb the depths of Georges Didi-Huberman’s abiding notion of the “eye of history” and, in particular, I explore to which responsible acts this notion might hold us. Does a reader of texts or viewer of an image have a right to claim a certain status as witness if the experience of being present at the crime is “merely” by the proxy of a text or an image? This is a fundamental ethical question and, consequently, a profoundly (...) political one that Didi-Huberman’s abiding exploration of the “eye of history” asks. I attempt to answer it by reading a variety of texts by the prolific author. In particular, however, I test what Didi-Huberman speculates in Images in Spite of All about what went through the mind of Alex, the Sonderkommando who took four furtive shots from an Auschwitz gas chamber, against what I’ve learned recently after having discovered the Hiroshima photographs made on 6 August 1945 by hibakusha Yoshito Matsushige. (shrink)

Shem-Tov Falaquera (c. 1225-1295) was a student of the writings of Maimonides and a leading expositor of the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophical traditions. His Epistle of the Debate (Iggeret ha-Vikkuah) is a delightful dialogue between two Jews, one learned in philosophy and the other not, about the permissibility and desirability of philosophical investigation by Jews. It is perhaps the most important medieval text devoted to the theme of the relationship between reason and religion by a Jewish thinker, and it (...) is an excellent introduction to Jewish philosophy. This volume contains the first critical edition of the Hebrew text of the Epistle of the Debate and an annotated English translation, the first into a modern language. The volume also includes essays on the sources of the Epistle and on Falaquera's position on the relation between reason and religion. (shrink)

In this essay I use personal narrative concerning my father and myself to compare and contrast the Heideggerian/sociological idea of "being-alongside-others" in the public world with the more classical philosophical ideal of inter subjective contact between two selves. I try to show that "being-alongside-others " in the public world does not dissolve the issue of intersubjectivity. To do this, I use narrative vignettes and develop some ideas about the role that intimacy plays in developing the sense of self; in particular, (...) I reflect on this process in terms of the relations of parents and children. (shrink)

All Buddhists go to the Buddha, Dhamma and Sa?gha as the ‘three refuges’, but who exactly are the ‘the eight types of persons’ that are referred to in the standard passage on the nature and qualities of the third refuge? Four of these persons are clearly the stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner, and Arahat, but who are the others, especially the lowest of them, the one practising for the realization of the stream-entry-fruit? This article aims to develop greater clarity on these eight (...) persons and their relationship to each other, and especially to focus on the first, who comes in the forms of the faith-follower and Dhamma-follower. It aims to get at the original meaning of such terms, and trace how these changed. In particular, it questions the appropriateness of the developed Pali tradition’s mapping of him/her as existing only for one moment, immediately prior to stream-entry, and seeks to gauge, from the suttas, at what point in a person’s practice they become such a person, and hence a member of the s?vaka-Sa?gha. In the process, the practices of the person practising for stream-entry are explored and the sutta meaning of terms such as ariya, ariya-s?vaka, sekha and sappurisa are also examined. (shrink)

``What Does a Right to Physician-Assisted Suicide (PAS) Legallyentail?''''Much of the bioethics literature focuses on the morality ofPAS but ignores the legal implications of the conclusions thereby wrought. Specifically, what does a legal right toPAS entail both on the part of the physician and the patient? Iargue that we must begin by distinguishing a right to PAS qua``external'''' to a particular physician-patient relationship from a right to PAS qua ``internal'''' to a particular physician-patientrelationship. The former constitutes a negative claim right (...) inrem that prohibits outside interference with the exercise of aright to PAS while the latter can provide the patient witha positive claim right in personam to obligatory assistancefrom his physician. Importantly, I argue that the creation of sucha patient right, however, originates with the physician who may exercise an unqualified right of first refusal prior to promisingto help her patient commit suicide. In doing so, I hope to establishthat explicit physician promises of assistance in dying shouldbecome legally binding. As such, current PAS law in both theNetherlands and Oregon is in need of substantive modification. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present a significant current British case of the application of an ethical approach to banking practice — it relates to issues of stakeholder dialogue, corporate strategy, and marketing.The Co-operative bank traces its organisational origins to the 1870s, and its founding principle to the beginnings of the co-operative movement in the 1830s.

In Educating Reason, Harvey Siegel presented the case regarding rationality and critical thinking as fundamental education ideals. In Rationality Redeemed? , a collection of essays written since that time, he develops this view, responds to major criticisms raised against it, and engages those critics in dialogue. In developing his ideas and responding to critics, Siegel addresses main currents in contemporary thought, including feminism, postmodernism and multiculturalism.

Quantum field theory, one of the most rapidly developing areas of contemporary physics, is full of problems of great theoretical and philosophical interest. This collection of essays is the first systematic exploration of the nature and implications of quantum field theory. The contributors discuss quantum field theory from a wide variety of standpoints, exploring in detail its mathematical structure and metaphysical and methodological implications.