Should we try to live in the present? Such is the imperative of modernity, Jed Rubenfeld writes in this important and original work of political theory. Since Jefferson proclaimed that 'the earth belongs to the living', since Freud announced that mental health requires people to 'get free of their past', since Nietzsche declared that the happy man is the man who 'leaps into the moment', modernity has directed its inhabitants to live in the present, as if there alone could (...) they find happiness, authenticity, and above all freedom. But this imperative, Rubenfeld argues, rests on a profoundly inadequate, deforming picture of the relationship between freedom and time. Instead, Rubenfeld suggests, human freedom, indeed human being itself, necessarily extends into both past and future; self-government consists of giving our lives meaning and purpose over time. From this conception of self-government, Rubenfeld derives a new theory of constitutional law's place in democracy. Democracy, he writes, is not a matter of governance by the present 'will of the people'; it is a matter of a nation's laying down and living up to enduring political and legal commitments. Constitutionalism is not coun. (shrink)

I deploy the sense-reference distinction and its kin from the philosophy of language to answer the question what in constitutional interpretation should, and should not, be able to change after founders adopt a constitutional provision. I suggest that a constitutional expression's reference, but not its sense, can change. Interpreters should thus give founders' assessments of reference only Skidmore-level deference. From this position, I criticize the theories of constitutional interpretation offered by Raoul Berger, Jed Rubenfeld, and Richard Fallon, and apply (...) the theory to whether the Fourteenth Amendment forbids racial segregation in public schools. (shrink)

"Combining aspects of his acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding has concentrated closely on these children's features and gestures, probing the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior. Design, composition, and the play of light and shadow are central elements in these photographs, but the images are much more than formal experiments; they confront disability in a way that affirms life. Fielding's sightless subjects project a vitality that seems to extend beyond the limits of (...) self-consciousness. In collaborative, joyful participation with the children, he has made pictures that reveal essential gestures of absorption and the basic expressions of our creatureliness. Fielding's work achieves what only great art, and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. (shrink)

This paper offers an original argument for a Humean thesis about promising that generalises to the domain of normative powers. The Humean ‘natural unintelligibility’ thesis – prominently endorsed by Rawls, Hart, and Anscombe, and roundly rejected or forgotten by contemporary writers (conventionalists and non – conventionalists alike) – holds that a rational, suitably informed agent cannot so much as make a promise (much less a morally-binding promise) without exploiting conventional norms that confer promissory significance on act types (e.g., signing on (...) the dotted line) that would not otherwise have such significance. The argument (like Hume’s) is action-theoretic in character; its central premise is the Contribution Condition on acting with an aim: roughly, that doing X in order to (bring about) Y requires that the agent believe that their having X-ed on the occasion might come to fully or partly account for Y’s coming to pass. The argument generalises to the broader domain of exercises of normative powers, i.e., to acts that modify normative properties by ‘fiat’ or ‘stipulation’. This stipulative act has been characterised in three different ways, each of which is given due consideration. Finally, two different ways of accommodating the ‘natural unintelligibility’ thesis are considered, as is the thesis’s normative significance. (shrink)

The “Dead Donor Rule” (DDR) is an important injunction shaping the field of organ retrieval and scholarly assessments of specific retrieval practices’ permissibility (e.g., Pasquerella, Smith, and...

Most Indian and Tibetan religious traditions have some theory of yogic perception-a profound type of sentience afforded by meditative practice. And most consider it the bedrock of their religious authority, the primary means by which one gains spiritual insight. Disagreements about what yogis perceive abound, however, spanning many philosophical topics, including epistemology, ontology, phenomenology, and language. Out of Sight, Into Mind is a groundbreaking exploration of debates over yogic perception, revealing their contemporary relevance as a catalyst for comparative philosophy. Jed (...) Forman examines intellectual and philosophical developments over a millennium in India and Tibet, offering rich analyses of many previously untranslated texts. He traces divergences and confluences between thinkers within and across traditions, demonstrating that accounts of yogic perception shifted from theories based on vision to ones based on the mind. Drawing on this investigation, Forman calls for broadening philosophical discourse, arguing that subjects like yogic perception have often been deemed "religious" and thus neglected. He contends that these Indian and Tibetan debates hold important lessons for present-day topics such as hermeneutics and exegesis, the relationship between conception and perception, representationalism versus phenomenalism, and the limits of language. Shedding new light on the intellectual history of yogic perception, this book models how a comparative approach can yield novel philosophical insights. (shrink)

From one of our most astute art critics, an impassioned and elegant book that questions the demand for art's political relevance or its need to deliver a message, and insists on its power to take us out of the everyday world, and its most important role: to excite, disturb, inspire or unsettle us. As more and more critics and enthusiasts insist that art needs to promote a particular idea or message, be it political or social, as a brand, a means (...) of education or entertainment, Jed Perl wants to remind us that the purpose of art lies not in our ability to define it, to place it in a context, whether a cause, an issue or an ideology. Instead the true power of art lies in its ability to shake our need for definitions, relevance or categories. He reminds us of the inherently uncategorizable nature of the artistic imagination, that a work of art is not merely a statement beamed out into the world, but the result of a dialogue between the artist and the tools and tradition of the medium, and that the fascination of the arts lies in their ability to be both dispassionate and impassioned. Perl explores the practices that are the foundation for the two catalysts of imaginative achievement: authority and freedom. He discusses the sense of vocation that give artists their purpose and focus, and how the interplay between authority and freedom underpin the creative process. (shrink)

An abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music.As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's "endless melody" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of (...) art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de siècle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in "visual music," encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern "isms."In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise. (shrink)

This book brings together cutting-edge writing by more than twenty leading authorities on the history of physics from the seventeenth century to the present day. By presenting a wide diversity of studies in a single volume, it provides authoritative introductions to scholarly contributions that have tended to be dispersed in journals and books not easily accessible to the general reader. While the core thread remains the theories and experimental practices of physics, the Handbook contains chapters on other dimensions that have (...) their place in any rounded history. These include the role of lecturing and textbooks in the communication of knowledge, the contribution of instrument-makers and instrument-making companies in providing for the needs of both research and lecture demonstrations, and the growing importance of the many interfaces between academic physics, industry, and the military. (shrink)

Most recent work on the nature of experiment in physics has focused on "big science"--the large-scale research addressed in Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks and Peter Galison's How Experiments End. This book examines small-scale experiment in physics, in particular the relation between theory and practice. The contributors focus on interactions among the people, materials, and ideas involved in experiments--factors that have been relatively neglected in science studies. The first half of the book is primarily philosophical, with contributions from Andrew Pickering, Peter (...) Galison, Hans Radder, Brian Baigrie, and Yves Gingras. Among the issues they address are the resources deployed by theoreticians and experimenters, the boundaries that constrain theory and practice, the limits of objectivity, the reproducibility of results, and the intentions of researchers. The second half is devoted to historical case studies in the practice of physics from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. These chapters address failed as well as successful experimental work ranging from Victorian astronomy through Hertz's investigation of cathode rays to Trouton's attempt to harness the ether. Contributors to this section are Jed Z. Buchwald, Giora Hon, Margaret Morrison, Simon Schaffer, and Andrew Warwick. With a lucid introduction by Ian Hacking, and original articles by noted scholars in the history and philosophy of science, this book is poised to become a significant source on the nature of small-scale experiment in physics. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn's singular voice was stilled by cancer on June 17, 1996, some 49 years after his initial encounters with past science had drawn him into a career in the history and philosophy of science. One of the most widely-read and influential academics of the 20th century, Kuhn was educated at Harvard University, where he received an S.B. in Physics in 1943 and a Ph.D. in the subject in 1949. He remained there until 1956, first as a Junior Fellow (...) in the Society of Fellows from 1948 to 1951, when he in effect retrained himself as a historian of science, and then as an Assistant Professor of General Education and History of Science. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956, becoming Professor of History of Science in 1961. From 1964 to 1979 he was on the faculty of the History of Science Program of Princeton University, and from 1972 to 1979 also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. He moved to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979, where he became Professor Emeritus in 1991. He was President of the History of Science Society in 1968—70 and of the Philosophy of Science Association in 1988–90. He received the George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society in 1982 and the John Desmond Bernal Award of the Society for the Social Studies of Science in 1983. (shrink)

A notable feature of our moral and legal practices is the recognition of privileges, powers, and entitlements belonging to a select group of individuals in virtue of their status as victims of wrongful conduct. A philosophical literature on relational normativity purports to account for this status in terms of such notions as interests, rights, and attitudes of disregard. This paper argues that such individualistic notions cannot account for prevailing and intuitive ways of demarcating the class of victims. The focus of (...) the discussion is the wrongful infliction of harm, and the mediating role played by impersonal “danger-making properties” in the determination of the class of victims. Beginning with a treatment of one of the most well-known discussions of negligently-inflicted harm — from the most famous case of the American common law tradition, Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. — the analysis is then extended to the morality of harm-doing more broadly, negligent and intentional alike. The paper’s chief targets are interest theories of rights — including contractualist theories of moral claim-rights of the kind defended by R. Jay Wallace — and neo-Strawsonian Quality of Will theories of “moral injury”. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 53-57.

ABSTRACTThis paper assesses to what extent the neo-Republican accounts of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit adequately capture the nature of political liberty at Rome by focusing on Cicero's analysis of the libera res publica. Cicero's analysis in De Republica suggests that the rule of law and a modest menu of individual citizens’ rights guard against citizens being controlled by a master's arbitrary will, thereby ensuring the status of non-domination that constitutes freedom according to the neo-Republican view. He also shows the (...) difficulty of anchoring an argument for citizens’ full political participation in the value of non-domination. While Cicero believed such full participation was essential for a libera res publica, he, like other elite Romans, argued for participation on the basis of liberty conceived as the space to contend for and enhance one's social status. The sufficiency of the rule of law and citizens’ rights for securing a status of non-domination taken together with their insufficiency for ensuring a libera res publica suggests that neo-Republican accounts of liberty do not fully capture the idea as articulated in Cicero's Republicanism. (shrink)

This article argues that the dominant “nonconventionalist” theories of promising cannot account for the moral impact of two basic commercial practices: the transfer of contractual rights and the discharge of contractual debt in bankruptcy. In particular, nonconventionalism’s insensitivity to certain features of social context precludes it from registering the moral significance of these social phenomena. As prelude, I demonstrate that Seana Shiffrin’s influential position concerning the divergence between promise and contract commits her to impugning these features of the modern economy. (...) Finally, I examine the importance of promising for friendship and why we resist the commodification of promissory rights in this domain. (shrink)

Le Songe de Scipion est l’occasion pour Cicéron de revenir sur cette notion généralement dévalorisée politiquement qu’est l’espoir, par le biais de la longue narration d’un rêve, dans lequel Scipion a eu la vision, non seulement de sa destinée future, mais de l’ensemble de l’univers, et a été instruit du destin des âmes humaines après la mort. En réponse aux interrogations du républicanisme antique sur les limites dans lesquelles une République peut aspirer à la gloire et à l’expansion impériale, l’eschatologie (...) développée par Cicéron dans le Songe de Scipion vient relégitimer l’espoir, en le réorientant vers cette gloire céleste, et non plus terrestre, promise après la mort aux hommes politiques attachés à la vertu. Prêter attention au traitement de l’espoir dans le De Republica permet à la fois de ressaisir l’unité que forme le Songe avec le reste de l’œuvre et d’esquisser l’histoire d’une réflexion sur la valeur politique de l’espoir. (shrink)

Cicero is one of the most important and influential thinkers within the history of Western philosophy. For the last thirty years, his reputation as a philosopher has once again been on the rise after close to a century of very low esteem. This Companion introduces readers to 'Cicero the philosopher' and to his philosophical writings. It provides a handy port-of-call for those interested in Cicero's original contributions to a wide variety of topics such as epistemology, the emotions, determinism and responsibility, (...) cosmopolitanism, republicanism, philosophical translation, dialogue, aging, friendship, and more. The international, interdisciplinary team of scholars represented in this volume highlights the historical significance and contemporary relevance of Cicero's writings, and suggests pathways for future scholarship on Cicero's philosophy as we move through the twenty-first century. (shrink)

An engaging, compelling and disturbing confrontation with evil...a book that will be transformative in its call for individual and collective moral responsibility." - Michael A. Grodin, M.D., Professor and Director, Project on Medicine and the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University Human Subjects Research after the Holocaust challenges you to confront the misguided medical ethics of the Third Reich personally, and to apply the lessons learned to contemporary human subjects research. While it is comforting to believe that (...) Nazi physicians, nurses, and bioscientists were either incompetent, mad, or few in number, they were, in fact, the best in the world at the time, and the vast majority participated in the government program of "applied biology." They were not coerced to behave as they did-they enthusiastically exploited widely accepted eugenic theories to design horrendous medical experiments, gas chambers and euthanasia programs, which ultimately led to mass murder in the concentration camps. Americans provided financial support for their research, modeled their medical education and research after the Germans, and continued to perform unethical human subjects research even after the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial. The German Medical Association apologized in 2012 for the behavior of its physicians during the Third Reich. By examining the medical crimes of human subjects researchers during the Third Reich, you will naturally examine your own behavior and that of your colleagues, and perhaps ask yourself "If the best physicians and bioscientists of the early 20th century could do evil while believing they were doing good, can I be certain that I will never do the same?" · Presents relatively unknown aspects of human subjects research during the Third Reich · Reveals surprising relationships between German and American human subjects research · Dispels myths about Nazi human subjects research · Compels introspection and self-examination by today's medical and research practitioners · Addresses contemporary bioethical issues affecting vulnerable populations · Brings together experts in the history of medicine during the Third Reich and thoughtful new voices. (shrink)

This book provides a history of Nazi medical euthanasia programs, demonstrating that arguments in their favor were widely embraced by Western medicine before the Third Reich. Contributors find significant continuities between history and current physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia and urge caution about their legalization or implementation.

I scratch your back, you scratch mine—how must these services relate in order to constitute a quid pro quo exchange? In the ordinary quid pro quo exchange, each party agrees to do their part in order to get the other party to do theirs; each conditions their own willingness to perform on the willingness of the other; and each regards the other as obligated to do their part in light of their agreement. But not all exchanges are ordinary, and a (...) proper analysis is of considerable practical and theoretical significance. In the law alone, quid pro quo figures prominently in a wide range of contexts—civil as well as criminal, public as well as private—and lies at the core of a number of raging controversies concerning official corruption, insider trading, and other matters. This Article offers the first philosophical analysis of quid pro quo exchange in the Anglophone tradition. (shrink)

A prolific philosopher who also held Rome's highest political office, Cicero was uniquely qualified to write on political philosophy. In this book Professor Atkins provides a fresh interpretation of Cicero's central political dialogues - the Republic and Laws. Devoting careful attention to form as well as philosophy, Atkins argues that these dialogues together probe the limits of reason in political affairs and explore the resources available to the statesman given these limitations. He shows how Cicero appropriated and transformed Plato's thought (...) to forge original and important works of political philosophy. The book demonstrates that Cicero's Republic and Laws are critical for understanding the history of the concepts of rights, the mixed constitution and natural law. It concludes by comparing Cicero's thought to the modern conservative tradition and argues that Cicero provides a perspective on utopia frequently absent from current philosophical treatments. (shrink)

In their article, Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) outline the conditions that they have identified as situations in which it is ethically permissible to use chemical restraints, defined as medicati...

Unfortunately, only after online first article publication, it was noticed that the first four sentences in footnote two were incorrect.

Despite the substantial and important differences between Achinstein and Laudan, many historians of science would see little distinction between them. Both of these philosophers believe and strongly maintain that argumentation was a central aspect of the historical events involved in the establishment of wave optics. Contemporary historians would prefer to ask whether argumentation did much work at all - whether, that is, anyone ever actually persuaded anyone else to change a belief. I will attempt briefly to show that issues of (...) skilled knowledge, tacit understanding, and novel instrumentation, rather than straightforward assertions based on the overt structure of the contending theories, offer a better way to understand what took place. (shrink)

Emily Dickinson's poetry is deeply philosophical. Recognizing that conventional language limited her thought and writing, Dickinson created new poetic forms to pursue the moral and intellectual issues that mattered most to her. This collection situates Dickinson within the rapidly evolving intellectual culture of her time and explores the degree to which her groundbreaking poetry anticipated trends in twentieth-century thought. Essays aim to clarify the ideas at stake in Dickinson's poems by reading them in the context of one or more relevant (...) philosophers, including near-contemporaries such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Hegel, and later philosophers whose methods are implied in her poetry, including Levinas, Sartre and Heidegger. The Dickinson who emerges is a curious, open-minded interpreter of how human beings make sense of the world - one for whom poetry is a component of a lifelong philosophical project. (shrink)

The creditions model is incredibly powerful at explaining both how beliefs are formed and how they influence our perceptions. The model contains several cognitive loops, where beliefs not only influence conscious interpretations of perceptions downstream but are active in the subconscious construction of perceptions out of sensory information upstream. This paper shows how this model is mirrored in the epistemology of two central Buddhist figures, Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti. In addition to showing these parallels, the paper also demonstrates that by drawing (...) on Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti's theory, we can extend the explanatory power of the creditions model. Namely, while creditions explain how beliefs influence both the conscious interpretation and subconscious construction of sensory information, Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti suggest beliefs can even be generative of sensory-like information. I recruit ancient Buddhist texts in conjunction with contemporary cognitive science scholarship to offer a hypothesis for the cognitive mechanisms responsible for this. (shrink)

Academic misconduct runs rampant across higher education institutions in the US and internationally. Ample empirical research has identified myriad student variables that predict AM. However, two variables have been unexamined: the quality of conceptual knowledge university students have on AM and the relation between goals for going to university and reception to intervention on AM. Quantitative content analysis on written responses by 356 first-year university students reported surface-level knowledge of AM, frequent citation of extrinsic goals, and a lack of association (...) between goals and receptiveness to intervention. Results corroborate prior research on university students’ limited understanding of AM. Results suggest that efforts to address AM do not need to tailor intervention components to match students’ goals for attending university. (shrink)

Tibetan Buddhism, the Gelug school specifically, promotes a deep skepticism about the ability to know others’ minds. Its scripture is rife with cautionary tales allegorizing and extolling this skepticism in adherents, while claiming a buddha, by contrast, has eradicated this skepticism with their omniscience. I describe a buddha’s purported privileged epistemic access to others’ minds as “double-hiddenness.” On this skepticism, not just what a buddha knows, but if they know it is hidden, making their authority irreputable. I use critical theory (...) to investigate the ramifications of this double hiddenness, demonstrating that the resultant subjectivization brought about by this extreme skepticism—although the product of power—is not merely a type of subjugation, as suggested by Foucault, but also constitutes a robust agency. (shrink)

Analogues between the coherentism-foundationalism debate in Western philosophy and Candrakīrti's critique of Dignāga's Pramāṇavāda approach are well attested.1 Many scholars who argue that Candrakīrti advocates a form of coherentism cite the following verse from Clear Words as evidence: Thus, knowledge of worldly objects is determined through the fourfold epistemic instruments. And those are established with respect to each other. When the epistemic instruments are correct, so are their objects, and when the objects to be validated are correct, so are their (...) epistemic instruments. It is not at all the case that the nature of the epistemic instrument or of the epistemic object is... (shrink)