Following the lead of Annette Baier, this essay argues that trust relations provide the ethical substance of everyday living. When A trusts B, A unreflectively allows B to approach sufficiently close so as to be able to harm A. In order for this to be possible, A practically presupposes that B perceives A as a person and will hence act accordingly. Trust relations are relations of mutual recognition in which we acknowledge our mutual standing and vulnerability with respect to one (...) another. A robust account of trust assumes: first, trust relations are primary and practical, and while monitored by reason, they are not rationally constituted; second, trust can sustain its practical primacy over moral reason because it is developmentally prior to reason; and third, trust relations can be the bearers of our worth and vulnerability because they are the developmental products of first love. (shrink)

Emotion inheres simultaneously in individuals and in the social structures and relationships in which individuals are embedded. Beginning with a critical examination of T.H. Marshall's account of class resentment, this paper considers the emotional patterns of resentment in class inequality, in trade cycle changes in costs and opportunities for income, and in class cultures. Arising from social relationships, emotion is the basis of action that subsequently affects the structure of social relationships. Thus emotion connects phases of social structure separated by (...) time. (shrink)

This series is a rewriting, with expansion, of the short section on the 19th century at the close of "A Short History of Freethought.".

L'A. se penche sur la pensée de saint Thomas d'Aquin pour en lever les ambiguïtés apparentes, notamment au sujet de l'âme. Il définit cette dernière comme forme du corps mais elle subsiste en elle-même. Comprendre se fait sans organe corporel en la conversio ad phantasma. L'abstraction appréhende la forme pure et aussi l'essence avec la matière commune. La substance est à la fois individuelle et universelle. La conversio ad phantasma décrit l'abstraction initiale. L'A. définit ainsi aussi l'intelligere, la ratio et (...) l'intellectus en en levant les ambiguïtés. Saint Thomas d'Aquin passait facilement d'un ordre à l'autre, essentiel ou existentiel, parce que dans sa vision hiérarchique de l'univers chaque unité se transcende vers une unité ultérieure jusqu'à ce que Dieu soit atteint. (shrink)