The book asks how, and how much, we can improve our ethical standards—not lift our behaviour closer to our standards but refine the standards themselves. To answer this question requires answering most of the major questions of ethics. So the book includes a discussion of what a good life is like, where the bounds of the natural world come, how values relate to that world (e.g. naturalism, realism), how great human capacities—the ones important to ethics—are, and where moral norms come (...) from. Throughout the book, the question of what philosophy can contribute to ethics arises. Philosophical traditions, such as most forms of utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics, are, the book contends, too ambitious. Ethics cannot be what philosophers in those traditions expect it to be because agents cannot be what these philosophies require them to be. The book starts by questioning the adequacy of both appeals to intuition and the coherence method of justification in ethics (e.g. wide reflective equilibrium) and ends with a description of the sort of justification available to us. (shrink)

James Phillips’s _Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle_ reappraises the cinematic collaboration between the Austrian-American filmmaker Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) and the German-American actor Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992). Considered by his contemporaries to be one of the most significant directors of Golden-Age Hollywood, Sternberg made seven films with Dietrich that helped establish her as a style icon and star and entrenched his own reputation for extravagance and aesthetic spectacle. These films enriched the technical repertoire of the industry, challenged the (...) sexual mores of the times, and notoriously tried the patience of management at Paramount Studios. Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle demonstrates how under Sternberg’s direction Paramount’s sound stages became laboratories for novel thought experiments. Analyzing in depth the last four films on which Sternberg and Dietrich worked together, Phillips reconstructs the “cinematic philosophy” that Sternberg claimed for himself in his autobiography and for whose fullest expression Dietrich was indispensable. This book makes a case for the originality and perceptiveness with which these films treat such issues as the nature of trust, the status of appearance, the standing of women, the ethics and politics of the image, and the relationship between cinema and the world. Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle reveals that more is at stake in these films than the showcasing of a new star and the confectionery of glamor: Dietrich emerges here as a woman at ease in the world without being at home in it, as both an image of autonomy and the autonomy of the image. (shrink)

Offering a novel and pragmatic perspective, this timely book critically examines the development of a culture of machinist regulation and questions whether this approach is appropriate in an era of rising biological technologies. Adopting an ontological approach, James Griffin considers how current regulatory frameworks favour digital technology and how this may change in the future. Griffin adeptly investigates how regulation can impact the nature of new technologies, especially as biological computing is becoming more commonplace. Chapters provide a (...) wealth of critical analysis, considering cutting-edge technologies such as AI, prosthesis, and biological computing. Griffin outlines a proposed reformative system which focuses on the biological substrate in the creation of cultural works. The book serves to highlight the ever-increasing need for awareness of the importance of biological substrates and for a regulatory system which reflects this. The State of Cultural Biology will be an essential read for academics and students interested in intellectual property law, law and technology, legal philosophy and law's role in society. It will also prove invaluable to policymakers and professionals looking to broaden their knowledge on the regulation of modern technology. (shrink)

The view that the obligation to promote happiness is, as Popper puts it, "in any case much less urgent" than the obligation to eliminate unhappiness we might call the "Negative Doctrine". I know of no plausible form of the Negative Doctrine.

Studies the central topics of Wittgenstein's philosophy prior to and within the first parts of the Tractatus, covering such subjects as objects, substance, states of affairs, elementary propositions, pictures, and thoughts. He concludes that analysis is reduction to what is basic not in experience but in reference, and argues that the Tractatus is concerned not with problems of knowledge but with problems of sense.

This paper addresses the role of categories and dimensions in the classification of psychopathology. While psychopathology does not sort itself out neatly into natural categories, we do find rough, symptom-based groupings that, through refinement, become diagnostic categories. Given that these categories suffer from comorbidity, uncertain boundaries, and excessive “unspecified disorder” diagnoses, there has been a move toward refining the diagnoses with dimensional measures. The paper traces efforts both to improve the diagnostic categories with validators that allow at least partial validity (...) and to introduce dimensional measures into the diagnostic manual. Drawing from the philosophical pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, which emphasizes the practical, effect-sensitive consequences of a theory along with an emphasis on empirical evidence and the progressive, probabilistic character of knowledge, the paper argues that these efforts must be guided both by scientific validity and clinical utility. (shrink)

Madison Powers raises the difficult problem of repugnant desires. The problem is not only difficult but pervasive, more pervasive even than Powers says. He notes that it affects hedonist, eudaimonist, and desire-fulfilment forms of utilitarianism; but it also affects the form of utilitarianism that uses a list of irreducibly plural values, so long as one of the values on the list is pleasure or happiness, and it can affect non-utilitarian positions as well for the same reason.

Ethics appears early in the life of a culture. It is not the creation of philosophers. Many philosophers today think that their job is to take the ethics of their society in hand, analyse it into parts, purge the bad ideas, and organize the good into a systematic moral theory. The philosophers' ethics that results is likely to be very different from the culture's raw ethics and, they think, being better, should replace it. But few of us, even among philosophers, (...) settle real-life moral questions by consulting the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility, largely because, if we do, we often do not trust the outcome or cannot even reliably enough decide what it is. By contrast, James Griffin explores the question what philosophers can reasonably expect to contribute to normative ethics or to the ethics of a culture. Griffin argues that moral philosophers must tailor their work to what ordinary humans' motivational capabilities, and he offers a new account of moral deliberation. (shrink)

"Well-being," "welfare," "utility," and "quality of life," all closely related concepts, are at the center of morality, politics, law, and economics. Griffin's book, while primarily a volume of moral philosophy, is relevant to all of these subjects. Griffin offers answers to three central questions about well-being: what is the best way to understand it, can it be measured, and where should it fit in moral and political thought. With its breadth of investigation and depth of insight, this work (...) holds significance for philosophers as well as for those interested in political and economic theory and jurisprudence. (shrink)

Nancy revisits first philosophy's question of the relationship between the many ways of Being and defines ontological community and community more broadly by the communication/equivocation of the ways of Being rather than a common substance. Objections that Nancy's position is apolitical and ethically ambiguous take insufficient notice of the different task he has set himself. The preposition "with" names this new ontological conception of community, relieving it of a unifying point. A fraternal community of family resemblances without a father is (...) uncovered that allows for critical reflections on both Heidegger's fundamental ontology and Freud's speculations on the primal horde. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;The thesis is a comparison of Chinese and Western, Confucian and Christian, ideas and values. Its central focus is on caritas as the primary Christian virtue, and ren as the primary Confucian virtue. The comparison deals eventually with the way in which these virtues are read by Aquinas and Zhu Xi, and situated within their philosophies as a whole. Aquinas and Zhu Xi are in read in relation to (...) their traditions, in order to identify the tensions and presuppositions that are incorporated in their work. Attention is also given to the problems of reading historical texts, and texts from different cultural traditions, both in terms of the hermeneutic issues at work in such reading, and the possible significance that such reading might have for contemporary culture. (shrink)

Darwall's subject is a person's welfare – or to use his synonyms, a person's ‘good’, ‘interest’, ‘well-being’, ‘benefit’, or ‘eudaimonia’. Darwall is satisfied that there is a univocal notion here. I am unsure and shall come back to that question at the end.

It is our job now - the job of this book - to influence and develop the unsettled discourse of human rights so as to complete the incomplete idea.

This volume studies the origin and evolution of philosophical interest in Aristotle's Categories, and illuminates the earliest arguments for Aristotle's approach to logic as the foundation of higher education.

The article tries to qualify the contentious issue of whetherthere is a human right to welfare. Our notion of human rightsis practically without criteria for distinguishing between whenit is used correctly and when incorrectly. The first step inany satisfactory resolution of the issue about welfare rightsis to supply duly determinate criteria. I then consider thechief reasons for doubting that there is a human right towelfare, in the light of what seem to be, all things considered,the best criteria to attach to (...) the notion of a human right. (shrink)

Public health ethics, like the field of public health it addresses, traditionally has focused more on practice and particular cases than on theory, with the result that some concepts, methods, and boundaries remain largely undefined. This paper attempts to provide a rough conceptual map of the terrain of public health ethics. We begin by briefly defining public health and identifying general features of the field that are particularly relevant for a discussion of public health ethics.Public health is primarily concerned with (...) the health of the entire population, rather than the health of individuals. Its features include an emphasis on the promotion of health and the prevention of disease and disability; the collection and use of epidemiological data, population surveillance, and other forms of empirical quantitative assessment; a recognition of the multidimensional nature of the determinants of health; and a focus on the complex interactions of many factors—biological, behavioral, social, and environmental—in developing effective interventions. (shrink)

My aim is to map some ethical ground. Many people who reject consequentialism and deontology adopt virtue ethics. Contemporary forms of virtue ethics occupy quite a variety of positions, and we do not yet have any satisfactory view of the whole territory that we call “virtue ethics.” Also, I think that there is a lot of logical space outside consequentialism and deontology not occupied by virtue ethics. In fact, I am myself rather more attracted to the environs of virtue ethics (...) than to virtue ethics itself, which particular environs I shall come to later. But, first, we have roughly to locate virtue ethics. (shrink)

Eric Craig invites us to participate in a conversation about existential psychotherapy, which I am pleased to join, and I am able to articulate my questions and disagreements only because he has provided such a clear presentation of the relevant issues. Craig argues two major points: 1) that existential psychotherapy, at least in the United States, has lost its grounding in ontology, and that it must recover that grounding; and 2) that the only adequate ontology for grounding existential psychotherapy is (...) that of Martin Heidegger. In this commentary, I question both of these assumptions. Before proceeding to that discussion, however, we need two clarifications. The first involves.. (shrink)

James Griffin; IX—Consequences, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 167–182, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/65.

This paper is intended to contribute to the discussion of the differential level of adoption of Big Data among research communities. Recognising the impracticality of conducting an audit across all forms and uses of Big Data, we have restricted our enquiry to one very specific form of Big Data, namely general purpose taxonomies, of which Mosaic, Acorn and Origins are examples, that rely on data from a variety of Big Data feeds. The intention of these taxonomies is to enable the (...) records of consumers and citizens held on Big Data datasets to be coded according to type of residential neighbourhood or ethno-cultural heritage without any use of questionnaires. Based on our respective experience in the academic social sciences, in government and in the design and marketing of these taxonomies, we identify the features of these classifications which appear to render them attractive or problematic to different categories of potential user or researcher depending on how the relationship is conceived. We conclude by identifying seven classifications of user or potential user who, on account of their background, current position and future career expectations, tend to respond in different ways to the opportunity to adopt these generic systems as aids for understanding social processes. (shrink)

This book, the first of its kind, surveys the career of the renowned Australian-German theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky. Its nine chapters provide multidisciplinary analyses of Barrie Kosky’s working practices and stage productions, from the beginning of his career in Melbourne to his current roles as Head of the Komische Oper Berlin and as a guest director in international demand. Specialists in theatre studies, opera studies, musical theatre studies, aesthetics, and arts administration offer in-depth accounts of Kosky’s unusually wide-ranging (...) engagements with the performing arts – as a director of spoken theatre, operas, musicals, operettas, as an adaptor, a performer, a writer, and an arts manager. Further, this book includes contributions from theatre practitioners with first-hand experience of collaborating with Kosky in the 1990s, who draw on interviews with members of Gilgul, Australia’s first Jewish theatre company, to document this formative period in Kosky’s career. The book investigates the ways in which Kosky has created transnational theatres, through introducing European themes and theatre techniques to his Australian work or through bringing fresh voices to the national dialogue in Germany’s theatre landscape. An appendix contains a timeline and guide to Kosky’s productions to date. (shrink)

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 2010, given by James Griffin, an American philosopher.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 61-63 [Access article in PDF] Arguing from Neuroscience in Psychiatry James Phillips PHILIP GERRANS "A One-stage Explanation of the Cotard Delusion" provides an elegant example of the application of neuroscientific findings to known clinical phenomena in psychiatry. Gerrans argues that, in the cases of the Cotard and Capgras delusions, a one-stage explanation is sufficient to account for the clinical phenomena. That is, (...) the neuroanatomic defect and the consequent anomalous experience are sufficient to produce the delusion. According to Gerrans, we do not need to postulate that the delusion will emerge only if the anomalous experience is filtered through a faulty reasoning process (a two-stage explanation). Against the argument of Young and Leafhead (1996) that Cotard and Capgras delusions stem from the same neuroanatomic deficit and differentiate only in being processed differently—thus requiring a two-stage explanation—Gerrans argues that the respective neuroanatomic defects are in fact different, and that, therefore, the two delusional syndromes differ at the first stage and do not require the two-stage explanation suggested by Young and Leafhead.I do not have an opinion as to who is right in this disagreement, and I will devote these remarks to explaining why I do not have an opinion. In developing this explanation I will touch on what I find problematic in many discussions of neuroscience, neurocognitive models, and clinical psychiatry; I will thus use this article to highlight those problems.On the face of it, one would think that the issue raised by Gerrans should admit of a simple resolution. He argues that Capgras and Cotard delusions derive from different neural defects. Young and Leafhead, on the other hand, base their two-stage argument on the argument that the two delusions derive from the same neural defect. So which is it? Neuroscientists should be able to settle the issue and end the dispute. Gerrans remarks "that we need to look more closely at the CN [cognitive neuropsychiatric] explanation of the Capgras delusion." As he describes it, face recognition involves two components, a cognitive and an affective component, with separate neuroanatomic substrates. An individual successfully recognizes the face of a friend or acquaintance when she matches the cognitive recognition (cognitive component) with the affective tone of familiarity (second component). When there is a lesion in the neural substrate of the affective component, she may recognize the face but without the tone of familiarity. In her effort to understand her affective experience of the face as alien rather than as familiar, she may conclude that her friend has been replaced by a double. Thus we have the Capgras delusion.Let us now unpack this explanation. According to Gerrans, researchers have hypothesized [End Page 61] two anatomatically distinct pathways involved in face recognition. He writes: "Initially... these separate neuroanatomic substrates were hypothesized to lie in separate dorsal and ventral processing pathways, but the most persuasive hypothesis is that of Breen et al. that face recognition is performed in the ventral visual processing pathway, whereas covert [affective] recognition effects result from the activation of pathways connecting the ventral pathway and the limbic system. It is damage to these latter pathways that gives rise to the Capgras delusion."In other words, the explanation of Capgras delusions depends on a neurocognitive model, itself based on an unspecified base of neuroanatomic data. When Gerrans writes that "[t]he Capgras delusion arises in cases where, following a neurological accident, the pathways connecting the FRU [Face Recognition Unit] to the limbic system are damaged leaving ventral pathways and hence overt recognition unimpaired...," he means that the Capgras delusion arises in that manner if the proposed model bears any relation to the reality of the living brain and if real Capgras patients have suffered the hypothesized lesion. At this point the reader is struggling with the following questions: (1) What are the hard neuroanatomic data underpinning the neurocognitive model? (2) What is the argument for developing this model (single Face Recognition Unit with independent pathways to cognitive and affective components of face recognition) out of the hard data? (3) What is the evidence... (shrink)

Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) turns on a reading of the productive imagination in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In siding with the imagination, Heidegger declares his dissent from the neo-Kantianism of his contemporaries. Yet, when Heidegger subsequently elaborates his philosophy of art in the 1930s, he is dismissive of the imagination altogether. His earlier partisanship was qualified. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger treats the productive imagination of Kant’s critical (...) period as still a step short of Heidegger’s own problem of the time of finite human beings. German Idealism’s step past Kant is, for Heidegger, a step beyond, but in the wrong direction. The aesthetics of German Idealism builds on the unification of experience and conceptuality wrought by the productive imagination in its transcendental use, thereby inscribing in the work of art a neglect of finitude that Heidegger will dispute. If what Heidegger holds against the imagination is its transcendental use, the fully empirical concept of the imagination in Kant’s precritical writings invites reassessment in light of an engagement with finitude. I will show it has particular promise for rehabilitating the imagination in a Heideggerian philosophy of art. (shrink)

To achieve its goals of managing andrestricting access to psychiatric care, managedcare organizations rely on an instrument, theoutpatient treatment report, that carriessignificant implications about how they viewpsychiatric patients and psychiatric care. Inaddition to involving ethical transgressionssuch as violation of patient confidentiality,denial of access to care, spurious use ofconcepts like quality of care, and harassmentof practitioners, the managed care approachalso depends on an overly technical,instrumental interpretation of human beings andpsychiatric treatment. It is this grounding ofmanaged care in technical reason that I (...) willexplore in this study. I begin with a reviewof a typical outpatient treatment report andshow how, with its dependence on the DSM-IV,on behavioral symptoms and patient`functioning'', on the biomedical model ofpsychiatric illness, and on gross quantitativemeasures, the report results in a crude,skeletonized view of the human being as acongeries of behavioral symptoms and functions. I then develop the managed care construal ofhuman existence further by showing itsgrounding in technical reason, exploring thelatter in its modern embodiment and deriving itand its opposite, practical reason, fromAristotle''s distinction between technical andpractical reason, techne and phronesis. Inthis analysis of the role of technical reasonin managed care, I point out that managed caredid not have to develop its rationale de novobut could rather lift its arguments, e.g. thebiomedical model, from contemporary psychiatryand simply apply them in a restrictive manner. Finally, I conclude this study by arguing forpsychiatry''s status as a discipline ofpractical knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Non-Cartesian Frameworks”James Phillips (bio)Whither psychoanalytic theory and practice? This is the question raised by Louis Berger as he confronts psychoanalysis’s response to the collapse of Cartesianism that has shaken the foundations of other humanist disciplines (as well as the natural sciences) and has finally caught up with Freud’s heirs. Anyone wanting evidence of this shakeup in psychoanalysis need only consult the final 1994 issue of the (...) International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. For the seventy-fifth anniversary edition of the journal, the editors organized a symposium on “The Conceptualization and Communication of Clinical Facts in Psychoanalysis.” In his foreword to the 300-page issue, the editor, David Tuckett (1994, 865–70), evokes the theoretical pluralism that has beset the field and asserts what is the presupposition of all the articles that follow: There are no theory-free facts, and the challenge now is to deal with this reality.I think I can assume, however, that for Berger these papers would mostly fall into his category of “not going far enough.” He invokes a Cartesian representationalism, critiqued variously by Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Castoriadis, that continues to infect even such discussions of fact and theory in psychoanalysis as those in the landmark volume of the International Journal. Thus, though that volume may represent the official announcement of the death of positivism in psychoanalysis, it stops short of announcing the profession’s entry into the postmodern era. Indeed, it should be noted that in much contemporary discussion, an awareness of the issues of theoretical pluralism and fact/theory dilemmas rests quite comfortably with the most blatant examples of representational thinking. The object-relations tradition, for instance, remains such a dominant force that most of us would have a hard time giving up our talk of internal objects and internal representations.Berger’s presentation of the three critics of representational thought is clear and enlightening. The inclusion of Castoriadis is important because he, unlike Heidegger and Wittgenstein, is a clinician. Berger’s application of this critique of representation to psychoanalysis, and specifically to the question of the theory/practice relationship, is also developed in a meaningful way. (For a development of the critique of representational thinking that emphasizes the role of Locke in expanding the Cartesian tradition, see Nasser 1994.) Since I am in agreement with the thrust of Berger’ s presentation and have little to add to it, I will focus my comments on one area that I think does warrant further discussion—the relations between the postmodern and other postempiricist or postpositivist traditions. Although some writers (e.g., Leary 1994; Silverman 1994) tend to group movements such as postmodernism, hermeneutics, [End Page 187] and social constructionism together, Berger’s argument singles out postmodernism as the only truly nonrepresentational postempiricist movement.Of the other non-Cartesian traditions, Berger says that “their tacit retention of representationalism (including its concomitant, the theory/practice dichotomy) demonstrates their failure to identify, adequately understand, or avoid key Cartesian difficulties and limitations. They fail to appreciate the effects which accompany enframing.” He adds later: “I have been making my point with examples drawn mostly from the American Middle School, but I submit that any analytic position that invokes models or analogous logical formalisms—e.g., hermeneutic, self-psychological, constructionist, action linguistic—is subject to the identical criticisms.” I wish to take up the case of hermeneutics and question whether its differentiation from postmodernism does indeed revolve around the issue of representational thought. Sorting this issue out will bear on the final conclusions of Berger’s paper. It is true, as Berger points out, that hermeneutic discussion in psychoanalysis often involves a comparison of (representationally articulated) models; but that is not the whole story regarding hermeneutics. Remember, after all, that Heidegger—directly in Being and Time (1962, 62), and indirectly through his profound influence on Gadamer—was a pivotal figure in the development of hermeneutics. Heidegger considered his analysis of man’s precognitive enmeshment in the world to be a “hermeneutic of Dasein.” For his part, Gadamer’s analysis of man’s relations to others and to the world concludes in a relationship that is mediated through a language that is fully dialectical and... (shrink)

Dr. Otto Doerr-Zegers's article is so interesting and insightful that I have nothing critical to say about it. On the other hand, in finding Greek, mainly Platonic, origins for psychotherapy, he offers us much to think about. In this brief commentary I will attempt to draw out some of the implications of his analysis for contemporary psychotherapy.Doerr-Zegers's analysis begins with a reflection on Socrates' Maieutics, Socrates' invoking the midwife metaphor to convey his use of dialectics to bring forth the ignorance (...) of his interlocutor. Dörr recognizes that Maieutics is a kind of psychotherapy in that, like psychotherapy, it involves a "treatment by the word." He takes this verbal dimension of the treatment back... Read More. (shrink)