NEITHER in the scholarly nor in the philosophical literature on Aristotle does his account of friendship occupy a very prominent place. I suppose this is partly, though certainly not wholly, to be explained by the fact that the modern ethical theories with which Aristotle’s might demand comparison hardly make room for the discussion of any parallel phenomenon. Whatever else friendship is, it is, at least typically, a personal relationship freely, even spontaneously, entered into, and ethics, as modern theorists tend to (...) conceive it, deals rather with the ways in which people are required to regard, and behave toward, one another, than with the organization of their private affairs. To the extent, then, that one shares this modern outlook one will tend to neglect, or treat merely as an historical curiosity, Aristotle’s efforts to define friendship and to place it within the framework of human eudaimonia, the theory of which is central to moral philosophy as he understands it. Yet in the Nicomachean Ethics the two books on φιλία make up nearly a fifth of the whole, and this seems to me a fair measure of the importance of this subject to the complete understanding both of Aristotle’s overall moral theory and even of many of the more circumscribed topics to which so much scholarly and philosophical attention has been devoted. If, as I suggest, the failure of commentators to appreciate its importance is partly the effect of distortions produced by the moral outlook that has predominated in modern moral philosophy, the careful study of these books may help to free us from constricting prejudices and perhaps even make it possible to discover in Aristotle a plausible and suggestive alternative to the theories constructed on the narrower base characteristic of recent times. (shrink)

The Heirs of Plato is the first full study of the various directions in philosophy taken by Plato's followers in the first seventy years after his death in 347 BC - the period generally known as 'The Old Academy', unjustly neglected by historians of philosophy. Lucid and accessible, John Dillon's book provides an introductory chapter on the school itself, and a summary of Plato's philosophical heritage, before looking at each of the school heads and other chief characters, exploring both (...) what holds them together and what sets them apart. (shrink)

I discuss the division of the soul in plato's "republic". i concentrate on the arguments and illustrative examples given in book iv, but i treat the descriptions of different types of person in viii-ix and elsewhere as further constituents of a single, coherent theory. on my interpretation plato distinguishes three basic kinds of motivation which he claims all human beings regularly experience in some degree. reason is itself the immediate source of certain desires. in addition, there are appetitive and also--quite (...) distinct from either of the other two--competitive motivations. (shrink)

Plato is associated with the idea that the body holds us back from knowing ultimate reality and so we should try to distance ourselves from its influence. This sentiment appears is several of his dialogues including Theaetetus where the flight from the physical world is compared to becoming like God. In some major dialogues of Plato's later career such as Philebus and Laws, however, the idea of becoming like God takes a different turn. God is an intelligent force that tries (...) to create order in the physical world. I argue that likeness to God in these dialogues involves imitating God's effort by trying to order our bodies, souls, and societies as intelligence directs. Becoming like Plato's God is not to abandon the world. It is to improve it. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently revived the study of the ancient Greek topics of virtue and the virtues—justice, honesty, temperance, friendship, courage, and so on as qualities of mind and character belonging to individual people. But one issue at the center of Greek moral theory seems to have dropped out of consideration. This is the question of the unity of virtue, the unity of the virtues. Must anyone who has one of these qualities have others of them as well, indeed all of (...) them—all the ones that really do deserve to be counted as virtues? Even further, is there really no set of distinct and separate virtuous qualities at all, but at bottom only a single one—so that the person who has this single condition of “virtue” is entitled also to the further descriptions “honest” and “well-controlled” and “just” and “friendly” and “courageous” and “fostering” and “supportive,” and so on, as distinguishable aspects or immediate effects of his unitary “virtue”? (shrink)

In their trenchant panoramic overview – ranging from antiquity to the present-day – John and Anna Rist write with authority and ennui about nothing less than the loss of the foundational culture of the West. The authors characterize this culture as the 'original tradition', viewing its erosion as one which has led to anxiety about the entire value of Western thought. The causes of the disintegration are discussed with an intensity rare in academe. Critics of modernity ordinarily concentrate on (...) the Enlightenment and the book certainly offers deep analysis of Enlightenment thought. But it goes further. Thus the cruelty of modern totalitarianism is now depicted as in the spirit of the French Revolution and its implacable hostility to a vanished primordial heritage, while scientism, bureaucracy and consumerism appear as the only rivals to a threatening nihilism. The book argues that Western thought has created a set of conflicting moral and spiritual customs: to the detriment of coherence, in individual minds as in society and culture. (shrink)

The ancient Stoics notoriously argued, with thoroughness and force, that all ordinary “emotions” (passions, mental affections: in Greek, pãyh) are thoroughly bad states of mind, not to be indulged in by anyone, under any circumstances: anger, resentment, gloating; pity, sympathy, grief; delight, glee, pleasure; impassioned love (i.e. ¶rvw), agitated desires of any kind, fear; disappointment, regret, all sorts of sorrow; hatred, contempt, schadenfreude. Early on in the history of Stoicism, however, apparently in order to avoid the objection that human nature (...) itself demands and indeed justifies—under certain circumstances at any rate—emotional attachments to or aversions from, and reactions to, some persons, things, and happenings, they introduced a theory of what came to be called eÈpãyeiai, good and acceptable ways of feeling or being affected. For short I will render these in English by “good feelings.”1 They divided these into three generic kinds, which they dubbed “joy” (xarã), “wish” (boÊlhsiw) and “caution” (eÈlãbeia). They ranged these alongside, and set them in sharp contrast to, three of the four highest genera into which they divided the normal human emotions: “pleasure” (≤donÆ), i.e., being pleased about something,2 “appetitive desire” (§piyuµ€a), and “fear” (fÒbow), respectively. The Stoics maintained that, though ordinary, familiar human emotions such as these last-named ones were always bad, the three sorts of “good feeling,” and their more specific variations (since these three are only the basic genera into which lots of other good ways of feeling will fall), were not merely free from the grounds of criticism on which ordinary emotions were rejected, and so were perfectly acceptable. The fully perfected human being (the “wise person”) would indeed regularly be subject to them.3 Their theory of the perfect human life did not, then, they could claim, require any outrageously unnatural demand, presumably unrealizable in any case, for a life completely without all feelings of involvement in the sweep and flow of life.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of Interpreting ReligionJohn M. Najemy*No aspect of Machiavelli’s thought elicits a wider range of interpretations than religion, and one may wonder why his utterances on this subject appear to move in so many different directions and cause his readers to see such different things. One reason is of course his famous challenge to conventional piety in the advice to princes (...) (in chapter 18 of The Prince) that, while it is important to appear to be “all compassion, faith, integrity, humanity, and religione, and there is nothing more necessary for a prince than to appear to have the last of these,” these “qualities” can actually be “damaging” if a prince insists on observing them at all times. For it is sometimes necessary to act “against faith, against charity, against humanity, and against religione.” 1 Machiavelli probably never wrote more famous or infamous words than these, even though they express an obvious, and hardly original, truth about all politics. But the world of the later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reformations and religious absolutisms could not tolerate such honesty, and Machiavelli’s reputation was quickly tarred with accusations of devilish immorality by the very societies that thought it was godly to burn heretics. On the issue of religion Machiavelli became, and to some extent remains, a convenient scapegoat often blamed for the decline of religion in the modern world, all of which has no doubt intensified the polemical and ideological nature of the debates surrounding his views of religion in general and Christianity in particular. [End Page 659]The polar positions in the interpretation of Machiavelli’s ideas about religion are represented by Leo Strauss and Sebastian de Grazia. For Strauss, Machiavelli was a “teacher of evil,” a “blasphemer,” and a purveyor of lessons of a “diabolical” and “soulless character” whose purpose was to sabotage the heritage of thought and morality inherited from both Christianity and Greek philosophy. 2 De Grazia, by contrast, has recently given us a Machiavelli who “discourses about God always in the conventional reverent attitude,” who “never questions that there is good and evil,” and who, “by associating virtuous political action with grace and glory... argues that through this kind of active and political virtue men conform to God’s desire.” “Behind Niccolò’s insistence on political action,” says de Grazia, “stands God. He grants His grace when it is earned—in political coin.” 3 Part of the fascination of Machiavelli scholarship is the mystery of how this most outspoken and direct of political thinkers—a writer who pulled no punches and minced no words—could be the common referent of such wildly different readings. But it is equally curious to observe how uncannily these extreme positions mirror each other. Both give us true believers, one in the Word, the other in the subversion of the Word; and in both cases a believer who is always of a piece, true to himself, and possessed of an unshakeable commitment—whether positive or negative—toward the transcendent truth of Christianity. In short, for all the obvious differences, the similarities between Strauss’s “diabolical” Machiavelli and de Grazia’s reverent “friend of God” remind one of the old myth that devils are after all only fallen angels.The papers in this forum should certainly remove any doubt about the importance of religion in Machiavelli’s thought. They remind us of the prominence of religious language and examples in Machiavelli’s texts: his call for the “redemption” of Italy in the last chapter of The Prince; the esteem in which he holds the heads and founders of religions, whom he declares, in Discourses 1.10, to be the most praised of all famous men; the crucial appeal to the figure of Moses as the prototype of both founders of states and liberators of enslaved peoples; the central role that Machiavelli attributes to religion among the factors responsible for Rome’s power, unity, and political success; and his provocative critique of Christianity, which leads him, in a number of places, to blame the Christian faith for the relative weakness of both modern states and the modern ethic of citizenship. 4 The authors... (shrink)

In a fascinating and challenging article in this journal, Kadri Vihvelin presents a spirited and vigorous critique of the strategy of defending compatibilism about causal determinism and moral responsibility that employs the ‘Frankfurt-examples.’ Here is her presentation of such an example:… Jones … chooses to perform, and succeeds in performing, some action X. Tell the story so that it is vividly clear that Jones is morally responsible for doing X. If you are a libertarian, you may specify that Jones is (...) an indeterministic agent who can choose otherwise, given the actual past and the laws. If you are a compatibilist, you may fill in the details so that Jones does X in a way that satisfies your favorite account of the counterfactual or dispositional facts that make it true that Jones could have done otherwise in the sense you think relevant to responsibility. Now, add to your story the following facts: there is standing in the wings another agent, Black. Black is interested in what Jones does. In particular, he wants Jones to do X and, moreover, Black has it in his power to prevent Jones from doing anything other than X. (shrink)

While dominant management thinking is steered by profit maximisation, this paper proposes that sustained organisational growth can best be stimulated by attention to the common good and the capacity of corporate leaders to create commitment to the common good. The leadership thinking of Kautilya and Ashoka embodies this principle. Both offer a common good approach, emphasising the leader's moral and legal responsibility for people's welfare, the robust interaction between the business community and the state, and the importance of moral training (...) of leaders in identifying and promoting the common good. We argue that the complex process of re-orientating corporate priorities towards the common good requires alertness and concerted effort if both business and society are to truly benefit. As Ashoka said: ‘A good deed is a difficult thing’. (shrink)

I argue that the dispute between two leading theories of interpretation of legal texts, textual originalism and textual evolutionism, depends on the false presupposition that changes in the way a word is used necessarily require a change in the word’s meaning. Semantic externalism goes a long way towards reconciling these views by showing how a word’s semantic properties can be stable over time, even through vicissitudes of usage. I argue that temporal externalism can account for even more semantic stability, however. (...) Temporal externalism is the theory that the content of an utterance at time t may be determined by developments in linguistic usage subsequent to t. If this semantic theory is correct, then the originalist and evolutionist positions effectively collapse. Originalism is correct in that the original meaning of the text is the meaning that is binding on jurists, but evolutionism is vindicated, as it is the current practices and standards that determine the meaning the text now has, and has always had. Objections to temporal externalism, and to its application to the interpretation of legal texts, are considered and addressed. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett has argued that consciousness can be satisfactorily accounted for in terms of physical entities and processes. In some of his most recent publications, he has made this case by casting doubts on purely conceptual thought experiments and proposing his own thought experiments to "pump" the intuition that consciousness can be physical. In this paper, I will summarize Dennett's recent defenses of physicalism, followed by a careful critique of his position. The critique presses two flaws in Dennett's defense of (...) physicalism. First, I will rebut his case against the traditional conceptual arguments against physicalism. Second, I will present some empirical grounds for thinking that a crucial move in the argument against physicalism is well-supported. For someone, like Dennett, who finds conceptual arguments dubious, the empirical findings make it exceptionally difficult to deny the anti-physicalist argument. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:276 THE WILL AS IMPRESSION Hume writes, in the Treatise: Let no one, therefore, put an invidious construction on my words, by saying simply, that I assert the necessity of human actions, and place them on the same footing with the operations of senseless matter. I do not ascribe to the will that unintelligible necessity, which is suppos'd to lie in matter. But I ascribe to matter, that intelligible (...) quality, call it necessity or not, which the most rigorous orthodoxy does or must allow to belong to the will. I^ change, therefore, nothing in the receiv'd systems, with regard to the will, but only with regard to material objects. It is surely false that Hume changed "nothing in the receiv'd systems, with regard to the will." In one such "receiv'd system," that of Thomas Aquinas, the concept of will or volition is presented as internally related to two further concepts: that of the "final cause" or goal of the action, and that of "practical intellect," a form of cognition which is productive of its object. Will is always the will to something, a goal to be reached or a product to be produced. Thus will and final cause are concepts which presuppose one another. The mark, however, of the fact that someone wills to do something, i.e., that s/he in fact has some goal, is precisely that that agent knows, non-inductively and without observation, what s/he is doing or will do. The basis of this knowledge is neither evidence nor proof, but rather what Aristotle called "the practical syllogism." We will ask below what it means to describe the relationships among will, final cause, and practical knowledge as 'internal.' 277 The question to be explored here is this: what in fact becomes of the 'receiv'd concept of will' when one contends, in the empiricist spirit common to both Locke and Hume, that all of our knowledge about matters of fact is based on observation and induction? The answer to this question will turn out to be that, in the absence of a notion of "practical knowledge," the concept of final cause becomes unintelligible (since the final cause is precisely the object of practical knowledge); and thus the notion of will must be reconstrued, for Hume as an impression. As an impression it is a brute given, one that is furthermore mute (or lacking in propositional content). Hume views volition as an event, that object of inner experience which is the (Humean) cause of our voluntary actions. In what follows I shall first of all sketch Thomas Aquinas' view of the will (section I), following this with a discussion of the important hybrid view in Locke's Essay, where older notions of volition are presented within an incompatible epistemological framework. In section III we look at Hume's sharp response to Locke, and in section IV at his own doctrine of the will as impression. In the final section I attempt to distinguish two strands of causality in Hume's philosophy of human action, drawing at the same time a moral for the contemporary dispute about reasons and causes. One of the most fully developed of the "receiv'd systems with regard to the will" was that of St. Thomas Aquinas, who combined Neo-Platonist, Patristic, and Aristotelian sources into an 2 impressive and influential synthesis. Thomas' 278 doctrine on the will is guided by a Grand Analogy, one inspired by the Creation story in Genesis. He writes, at the beginning of the second main part of his Summa : Man is made to God's image, and since this implies... that he is intelligent and free to judge and master of himself, so then, now that we have agreed [in part one of the Summa] that God is the exemplar cause of things and that they issue from his power through his will, we go on to look at this image, that is to say, at man as the source of actions which are his own and fall under his responsibility and control. The analogy is this: God, the Divine Craf tsperson, is to the Creation as human agents are to their... (shrink)

On Sartre's own admission, his account of the emotions discloses them as functional. As such, the emotions aim to serve a particular purpose for which he provides the phenomenology. Sartre's phenomenology discloses consciousness as being-in-the-world in two ways, actually as having two worlds. One is a deterministic world, the other magical. Emotion is the drop from the deterministic world to the magical. In order for emotion to perform the function Sartre has in mind it performs, it is crucial there be (...) a certain tension between the deterministic world and the magical world. I argue that given what Sartre himself says about the magical world, the necessary tension can never arise; hence, no functional thesis of emotion is possible if it is formed along Sartre's lines. (shrink)

Deprivation accounts of death's badness, such as Feldman’s (1992), that purport to avoid questionable life-death comparatives Silverstein warns against (1980) by comparing only the values of various alternative life-wholes, implicitly depend upon assigning greater comparative value to periods of these life-wholes (for the person who lives) than is assigned to periods when the person is not alive, and thus are simply special cases of the problematic life-death comparative. Life-death comparatives undermine any deprivation account if (1) there is no way things (...) are (good or bad) for one who does not exist, and (2) values are comparative in the way specified by VC. Rejecting VC is not an option for the standard deprivation account, since this account uses VC to show that since continued life is good for the person who continues to live, death must be worse for that person. The non-standard deprivation account, dubbed by McMahan the reconciliation strategy, does not employ VC, but it also fails to vindicate common sense attitudes towards matters of life and death, and is in the main a capitulation to the Epicurean position. The remaining option for one who wishes to defend the view that death is typically bad for the person who dies is to directly target the Epicurean starting point, that things cannot be good or bad for a person when he does not exist. (shrink)

If now we turn to the recent translation of the Politics by Carnes Lord we see that the language of "rights" is completely avoided. Lord prefers to speak sometimes in terms of what a person or group of persons is "entitled to" under the laws, or of what is "open" or "permitted" to them; and he usually or always sticks to "justice" or a related term to translate δίκαιον and its derivatives--whether this is justice as established by the laws of (...) a given community or type of community, or the true or correct account of what justice is and demands. It is doubtful, though, whether Lord avoids rights-talk as a matter of interpretative principle. He aims to translate key terms of the Greek with a single English translation throughout, with the result that, since in any event Aristotle uses no single Greek term where we might be tempted to speak of rights, avoiding the language of rights may have seemed to him required simply by his conception of "literal" translation. In his glossary under the heading "Justice," he explicates τὸ δίκαιον in part as "a right or rightful claim" and adds that this sense is generally rendered in his translation by "[claim to] justice." So, if we take this glossary entry as giving his full view, Lord would not object to at least interpreting Aristotle in these passages as speaking of rights or rightful claims. However, Lord is a follower of Leo Strauss and in his avoidance of the noun "right" to render anything Aristotle says, he may also have been falling in with Strauss's own considered view, which was that any attribution of a notion of "rights" to Aristotle or any other ancient thinker is so grossly anachronistic that it must be strictly avoided. In the past forty years or so I think it is fair to say that this view of Strauss's has been shared increasingly by important writers on ancient politics and political thought. Perhaps this tendency is all the more prevalent with the onset of self-described "post-modernist" thought and the historicism in all interpretation of the past that it so often connotes. Is there anything to this objection of vicious anachronism? Were Barker and other older writers making a serious error in rendering and interpreting Aristotle so as to make him hold theories about various ancient constitutions as granting political and other legal rights to people living under them, and also theories of his own about the rights people have under justice as to what their political and legal rights shall be? A major thesis of Fred Miller's recent book, Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics is that they were not--at least they were not, once certain distinctions are carefully drawn, and one is careful to state what is and what is not implied by the "rights" talk they were so readily finding in Aristotle's texts. In what follows I will limit myself to discussing this thesis of Miller's and his handling of it. (shrink)

This paper applies an eight-step model of crisis management to the Gulf Oil disaster and discusses potential legal liabilities for BP. The eight steps are: ascertaining the facts, portraying the problem, allocating responsibility, responding to critics, adopting new policies, implementing new procedures, utilizing political/legal tactics, and costs in money and credibility. While crisis management responses often fall into either uniformly positive or uniformly negative patterns and outcomes, the BP case falls into a more complex pattern, where the company did some (...) things well and other things poorly, with BP making its worst mistakes in the pre-crisis stage. After examining BP’s response, the longer version of this paper examines the regulatory role and the application of the capture theory to the Minerals Management Service of the Department of Interior. That section and associated references are available upon request to the author. (shrink)

Philip B. Heymann, Terrorism, Freedom and Security: Winning Without War Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2003, pp. 288 #pl x.

Malthus' theological ideas were most clearly presented in the final two chapters of the first edition of his Essay on the Principle of Population. They can be classified under eight main headings. He admitted that the pressure of population causes much misery and evil, but he did not accept that this in any way impugned the benevolence of the Creator. He situated the population problem within the general context of the problem of evil, and argued that population pressure is permitted (...) and ordained by the Creator as a means of stimulating mankind to attain a higher good. He opposed the traditional Christian notion that this world is a state of trial, with population pressure being one aspect of that trial. He believed that this notion of a state of trial is inconsistent with the notion of an omniscient Creator, and that it is therefore necessary to reject the notion of a state of trial in order to save the notion of Divine omniscience. Instead of viewing this world as a state of trial, he viewed it ‘as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mindr. This notion of the growth of mind is the central aspect of Malthus' theology. He expressed doubts about the omnipotence of the Creator, arguing that God did not have the power to create perfect human beings instantaneously, but required a certain process or a certain time to form beings with ‘exalted qualities of mind’. Malthus seemed to argue that Divine omnipotence and Divine benevolence are incompatible – because a truly benevolent creator would not have subjected mankind to the miseries of this world if He had the power to create a perfect world. Malthus was prepared to sacrifice the notion of Divine omnipotence in order to save the notion of Divine benevolence. He saw the principle of population as part of the Divine plan for the replenishment of the earth, i.e. its full cultivation and peopling. His attitude to worldly pleasures and comforts was distinctly unpuritanical, and leaning towards hedonism. His ethics were world-enhancing, rather than world-denying and retreatist. He gave a naturalistic interpretation of the Biblical doctrine of original sin, describing original sin as the original state of torpor and sluggishness of every human being at the moment of birth. The purpose of the principle of population, and of the other difficulties encountered in life, is to stimulate man to raise himself out of this original state. Finally, Malthus' theology included the doctrine of annihilationism , according to which eternal life is not an essential part of the human soul at birth, but is granted only to those who attain during life on earth an adequate growth of mind. The others are, at death, not condemned to eternal suffering, but are annihilated, body and soul. (shrink)

These days, science is everywhere. It pervades our whole society. Sometimes it is just a clutter of commonplace frivolities, like new fashion fabrics. Sometimes it miraculously preserves our life, like penicillin. Sometimes, like climate change, it looms over us as a portent of doom: sometimes it promises a way of escape from such a fate. Sometimes, like a nuclear warhead, it enshrouds us in political terror: sometimes, like a verification technology, it offers an antidote to such evils. How should we (...) respond to this ambiguous and ubiquitous thing called science? (shrink)

Recent policy debates in the US over access to mental health care have raised several philosophically complex ethical and conceptual issues. The defeat of mental health parity legislation in the US Congress has brought new urgency and relevance to theoretical and empirical investigations into the nature of mental illness and its relation to other forms of sickness and disability. Manifold, nebulous, and often competing conceptions of mental illness make the creation of coherent public policy exceedingly difficult. Referencing a variety of (...) approaches to ethical reflection on health care, and drawing from the empirical literature on therapeutic efficacy and economic efficiency, we argue that differential rationing, ‘disparity,’ is unjustifiable. (shrink)

The application of the precautionary principle to an area of environmental protection, such as nature conservation, requires commitment to the idea that full scientific proof of a causal link between a potentially damaging operation and a long term environmental impact is not required. Adoption of the principle in Government statements related to sustainable development should therefore be seen in this context. The paper addresses the particular case of marine fish farming in Scotland where the principle was advocated but not upheld (...) in practice. In the light of this experience there is a need for educators and philosophers, ethicists and concerned scientists to ensure that the principle is more widely interpreted and understood. (shrink)

The purpose of Sheffield’s careful study is to increase scholarly appreciation of the Symposium as a ‘substantive work in Platonic ethics’ (3). Among the book’s highlights are a persuasive response to Vlastos’ criticism of Plato on love for individuals, an eminently reasonable assessment of the evidence for and against the presence of tripartite psychology in the Symposium, and a delightful interpretation of Alcibiades’ speech at the dialogue’s end—one that reveals elements of satyr play and corroborates rather than undermines Diotima’s account (...) of erôs. My review focuses on Sheffield’s account of Socrates’ speech. She devotes four of seven chapters to it. After summarizing her main argument, I raise two concerns: one about her account of immortality, the other about her interpretation of Plato as a rational eudaimonist. (shrink)