Annotation. This edited collection is the first to explore the implications of "Quantum Aesthetics" for social life. Contributors, who represent various disciplines, apply this philosophy to their respective fields of study.

The rift which has long divided the philosophical world into opposed schools-the "Continental" school owing its origins to the phenomenology of Husserl and the "analytic" school derived from Frege-is finally closing.

This chapter addresses the issues that motivate representationalist accounts, and it describes the different versions of representationalism as responses to these issues. It argues that the representationalist views do not adequately respond to the epistemological problems that motivate them and that they engender some ontological problems. The chapter presents an alternative ‘presentationalist’ account that preserves the straightforward sense of the mind's openness to the world. While representationalism and presentationalism agree that the relation between mental events or states is direct but (...) mediated, they radically differ in their views of the nature of the mediation involved in the mind's intentional directedness to the world. This difference and the preferability of the presentationalist account are explored. (shrink)

Although a growing body of research has shown the positive impact of ethical leadership on workplace deviance, questions remain as to whether its benefits are consistent across all situations. In this investigation, we explore an important boundary condition of ethical leadership by exploring how employees’ moral awareness may lessen the need for ethical leadership. Drawing on substitutes for leadership theory, we suggest that when individuals already possess a heightened level of moral awareness, ethical leadership’s role in reducing deviant actions may (...) be reduced. However, when individuals lack this strong moral disposition, ethical leadership may be instrumental in inspiring them to reduce their deviant actions. To enhance the external validity and generalizability of our findings, the current research used two large field samples of working professionals in both Turkey and the USA. Results suggest that ethical leadership’s positive influence on workplace deviance is dependent upon the individual’s moral awareness—helpful for those employees whose moral awareness is low, but not high. Thus, our investigation helps to build theory around the contingencies of ethical leadership and the specific audience for whom it may be more influential. (shrink)

Last year in June, British doctors went on strike for the first time since 1975. Amidst a global economic downturn and with many health systems struggling with reduced finances, around the world the issue of public health workers going on strike is a very real one. Almost all doctors will agree that we should always follow the law, but often the law is unclear or does not cover a particular case. Here we must appeal to ethical discussion. The General Medical (...) Council, in its key guidance document for practising doctors, Good Medical Practice, claims that ‘Good doctors make the care of their patients their first concern’. Is this true? And if so, how is this relevant to the issue of striking? One year on since the events, we carefully reflect and argue whether it was right for doctors to pursue strike action, and call for greater discussion of ethical issues such as the recent strikes, particularly among younger members of the profession. (shrink)

MODERN ARISTOTELIAN SCHOLARSHIP is heavily indebted to the German scholars of the nineteenth century who produced the Berlin Academy editions of Aristotle's corpus and of his Greek commentators. The foundations for this massive project were laid around the middle of the century by people like Schwegler, who edited and commented on Aristotle's Metaphysics. Yet, while acknowledging our debt to such exemplary scholarship, I want to cast doubt on one of his proposed emendations to Metaphysics 6.1, which influenced later editors like (...) W. D. Ross and Werner Jaeger. (shrink)

This was a class handout that I turned into a publication. As its title indicates, it's about the relation (or non-relation) of (ethical) cultural relativism to tolerance. Core elements of the paper were later absorbed into sections 5K, 6M, and 7K of my paper "Cultural Relativism" (2000), which is listed (and downloadable) on my PhilPapers page.

I have argued that like Harry Frankfurt, Augustine implicitly distinguishes between first-order desires and higher-order volitions; yet unlike Frankfurt, Augustineheld that the liberty to form different possible volitional identifications is essential to responsibility for our character. Like Frankfurt, Augustine recognizes that we can sometimes be responsible for the desires on which we act without being able to do or desire otherwise; but for Augustine, this is true only because such responsibility for inevitable desires and actions traces (at least in part) (...) to responsibility for our volitional identifications, which in turn has leeway-libertarianconditions. However, David Hunt has interpreted Augustine’s account of divine foreknowledge as implying a type of source-incompatibilism that does not require alternative possible actions or intentions. Moreover, while Eleonore Stump’s account of Augustine on sanctification supports my interpretation, Augustine’s position on predestination in his latest writings may be incompatible with liberty of the higher-order will. I will argue against Hunt’s interpretation but admit that the leeway-libertarian has to reject the ‘no autonomy’ model in some of Augustine’s late writings. (shrink)

Many Protestant denominations have or recently had policies that prohibit “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from being ordained. By only prohibiting “practicing” homosexuals, proponents of these policies claim that they do not discriminate against homosexuals as a group since, technically, a homosexual can still be ordained as long as she is “non-practicing.” In other words, a condemnation of homosexual practice is not the same as a condemnation of homosexual persons. I argue that this is not the case; the rhetoric of homosexual practice (...) does, in fact, amount to a condemnation of gays and lesbians. It does so by conflating the two things it claims to keep separate—homosexual conduct and homosexual identity. I demonstrate this conflation by analyzing the history of this rhetoric and how it has been adjudicated in church court decisions from the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA). (shrink)

In this paper the author discusses the complex question of whether Proclus regards theology as a demonstrative science along the lines of Euclidean geometry, or as a different kind of science that follows the dialectical model of Plato's Parmenides. This question is focused by considering the applicability to the Elements of Theology of the Euclidean model of science, while examining the limitations of this hermeneutical approach.

The popular mind is deep and means a thousand times more than it knows.It is fitting that the Royal Institute of Philosophy series on American philosophy include a session on the thought of Josiah Royce, for his most formidable philosophical work, The World and the Individual, was a result of his Gifford lectures in the not too distant city of Aberdeen in 1899 and 1900. The invitation to offer the Gifford lectures was somewhat happenstance, for it was extended originally to (...) William James, who pleaded, as he often did in his convenient neurasthenic way, to postpone for a year on behalf of his unsettled nerves. James repaired himself to the Swiss home of Theodore Flournoy, with its treasure of books in religion and psychology, so as to write his Gifford lectures, now famous as The Varieties of Religious Experience. In so doing, however, James was able to solicit an invitation for Royce to occupy the year of his postponement. Royce accepted with alacrity, although this generosity of James displeased his wife Alice, who ranted, ‘Royce!! He will not refuse, but over he will go with his Infinite under his arm, and he will not even do honour to William's recommendation.’ Alice was partially correct in that Royce, indeed, did carry the Infinite across the ocean to the home of his intellectual forebears, although on that occasion as on many others, he acknowledged the support of his personal and philosophical mentor, colleague and friend, William James. (shrink)

In April 2010, the American Philosophies Forum held a symposium called "The Future of Ethics" at Emory University. Many of the twenty-four presentations, revised in light of significant discussion at the symposium, now are published in this and the subsequent issue of this journal.The notion of "the future of ethics" is intentionally multivocal. It includes, but is not limited to, attention to the nature of ethics and ethical life; the relation of ethics to aesthetics, politics, logic, sciences, and other fields; (...) the appropriate methods or attunements for thinking about ethics; the roles and relations of reasoning, intuitions, feelings and desires, hopes, and habits in ethics and ethical life; the personal and .. (shrink)

This essay explores four questions: Is there an indifferent dimension to our lives?; what is the relation of indifference to our everyday differentiated meanings, interpretations, preferences, and values?; is it possible to develop an attunement to an indifferent dimension of life and, if so, how?; and, is a life marked by or attuned to indifference better than a life without it? In response, through a concrete example and analysis of a novel and a poem, I characterize indifference as both negation (...) and as a kind of power, engaging the views developed by Charles Scott. I conclude by linking indifference to a project of description, and show the limits to this project, whether it is labeled phenomenological or pragmatic. (shrink)

A POSTMODERN THINKER might very well be dismayed by the suggestions embedded in my title that the breach between modernism and postmodernism can be overcome and that Husserl is at all relevant to a discussion of postmodernism. Has not, after all, the postmodern critique revealed once and for all the poverty of the modern philosophical tradition with its epistemological and foundationalist concerns? And what better example of a philosopher working in the modern tradition than Husserl, who clearly identifies his own (...) philosophy as a form of "transcendental idealism" and who is clearly committed to the discovery of both an indubitable starting point upon which and a clear methodology by which philosophy can establish itself as a sure science of cognition? (shrink)

Brough's translation of Husserl's writings on time-consciousness found in volume 10 of the critical edition of Husserl's works is a welcome addition to the growing catalogue of translations of Husserl. The texts collected in Husserliana 10 are of central importance to understanding Husserl's phenomenology. They are indispensable first to understanding the "wonder" of time-consciousness, whose analysis is "an ancient burden", and the "most difficult" and "perhaps the most important" problem in phenomenology. But they are also indispensable to understanding the most (...) fundamental structures of all experience and of the ego. The irreducible and unitary form of time grounds the possibility of experiencing the duration, concreteness, and individuality of all objects, whether immanent or transcendent, whether processional or enduring; indeed, even ideal objects are experienced as timeless only against the backdrop of the temporal. The analysis of time-consciousness therefore discloses intentionalities essential to the experience of every possible object. (shrink)