The questions what the future will bring and if and how it is possible to anticipate coming events have intrigued human beings since the dawn of time. Over the course of the centuries human beings have found better and more sophisticated ways to calculate and predict certain prospective occurrences, for example earthquakes, thunderstorms et cetera. In the Europe of the nineteenth century this potential of rational sciences led to the idea that it would once be possible to anticipate everything that (...) will happen in the universe, going as far as that it should even become predictable how human beings will develop and which actions they will choose. The French philosopher Henri Bergson verbally fought against this kind of belief and developed a so-called process ontology, which claims that nothing in the universe is ever fixed. In fact everything that exists is an ongoing and evolutionary process without a fixed goal. And since—according to Bergson—our rational mind is solely capable of understanding and therefore predicting rigid entities but not processes, any belief in the complete predictability of the universe must be abandoned. Instead, we should focus on the possibilities of an open, spontaneous and creative future, which we will only then be able to understand, if we get more in touch with our so-called intuitive faculty, which is able to fathom a process in its processual state. (shrink)

Evidence is univocal, not equivocal. Its implications don't depend on our beliefs or values, the evidence says what it says. But that doesn't mean there's no room for rational disagreement between people with the same evidence. Evaluating evidence is a lot like polling an electorate: getting an accurate reading requires a bit of luck, and even the best pollsters are bound to get slightly different results. So, even though evidence is univocal, rationality's requirements are not "unique." Understanding this resolves several (...) puzzles to do with uniqueness and disagreement. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the (...) DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

I argue that “consent” language presupposes that the contemplated action is or would be at someone else’s behest. When one does something for another reason—for example, when one elects independently to do something, or when one accepts an invitation to do something—it is linguistically inappropriate to describe the actor as “consenting” to it; but it is also inappropriate to describe them as “not consenting” to it. A consequence of this idea is that “consent” is poorly suited to play its canonical (...) central role in contemporary sexual ethics. But this does not mean that nonconsensual sex can be morally permissible. Consent language, I’ll suggest, carries the conventional presupposition that that which is or might be consented to is at someone else’s behest. One implication will be a new kind of support for feminist critiques of consent theory in sexual ethics. (shrink)

For most of human history children have been a byproduct of sex rather than a conscious choice by parents to create people with traits that they care about. As our understanding of genetics advances along with our ability to control reproduction and manipulate genes, prospective parents have stronger moral reasons to consider how their choices are likely to affect their children, and how their children are likely to affect other people. With the advent of cheap and effective contraception, and the (...) emergence of new technologies for in vitro fertilization, embryo selection, and genetic engineering, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify rolling the genetic dice by having children without thinking about the traits they will have. It is time to face up to the awesome responsibilities that accompany our reproductive choices. (shrink)

The everyday expressions of nursing practices are driven by their entanglement in complex flows of social, cultural, political and economic interests. Early expressions of trained nursing practice in the United States and Europe reflect claims of moral, spiritual and clinical exceptionalism. They were both imposed upon—and internalized by—nursing pioneers. These claims were associated with an endogenous narrative of discipline and its physical manifestation in early nursing schools and hospitals, which functioned as “total institutions.” By contrast, the external forces—diffuse yet pervasive—impacting (...) upon contemporary nursing more closely align with the power dynamics explored in Gilles Deleuze's concept of the Society of Control. The example of sensor technology and telemetric monitoring of nurses’ locations in the clinical setting exemplifies the intense presence of surveillance, performance metrics and the “rationalization” of nursing practice. It falls upon nurses to recognize, accept or challenge these dynamics in order to shape the future of nursing practice into a discipline which embodies our values and priorities. (shrink)

This anthology is the first attempt to present a rounded picture of 'Kierkegaard as a philosopher' in English. After an introduction explaining how Kierkegaard viewed the task of 'becoming a philosopher', there are generous extracts from the Concept of Irony and the great pseudonymous works: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Prefaces, Johannes Climacus and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard's own attempts to summarize the significance of his writings are also included, so that readers have the (...) opportunity to make up their own minds about the adequacy of his retrospective accounting. The Kierkegaard who emerges from these pages is not only a penetrating analyst of temporality, individuality, and irony, but also a lithe, witty and versatile stylist. He is probably one of the greatest writers in the philosophical tradition, and surely one of the most humorous. The anthology makes use of a range of classic translations, and includes new translations by Jane Chamberlain and Jonathan Rée, explanatory introductions, an index and a glossary. (shrink)

Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2020, Page 187-199.

A central claim in contemporary philosophy of mind is that the phenomenal character of experience is entirely determined by its content. This paper considers an alternative called Mode Intentionalism. According to this view, phenomenal character outruns content because the intentional mode contributes to the phenomenal character of the experience. I assess a phenomenal contrast argument in support of this view, arguing that the cases appealed to allow for interpretations which do not require positing intentional modes as phenomenologically manifest aspects of (...) experience. (shrink)

The Discussion Method produces significant student learning outcomes. In a time where we are only beginning to witness artificial intelligence’s disruption of work and the economy, these learning outcomes are crucial to personal and professional success. This paper begins by tracing the role of the Discussion Method within the liberal arts tradition, and by extension the Confucian tradition. Second, this paper examines how the Discussion Method lost its value in higher education as a consequence of the employability problem. In this (...) section, the employability problem is defined as a two-fold misunderstanding among students and parents regarding the purpose of education and how to prepare for the workplace. Third, this paper reframes the purpose of the Discussion Method in an integrated curriculum for preparing students to achieve personal and professional success. Also, in the third section, student generated data serve as evidence to support the argument that discussion-based classes are an important missing element in undergraduate management education and discussion-based classes are superior to large lectures. This paper concludes that a discussion-based business pedagogy anchored by the liberal arts and sciences leads to eight major learning outcomes: how to reconcile opposing arguments; how to think on one’s own two feet; how to formulate cohesive arguments to reach a consensus; how to mitigate fear of sharing individual opinions by building relationship among classmates; how to allow students to learn better by motivating them to prepare more for class; how to enable students to remain engaged during and after class; how to embraces nuance; and how to integrate new ideas from disparate perspectives and disciplines. (shrink)

Molyneux asked whether a newly sighted person could distinguish a sphere from a cube by sight alone, given that she was antecedently able to do so by touch. This, we contend, is a question about general ideas. To answer it, we must ask (a) whether spatial locations identified by touch can be identified also by sight, and (b) whether the integration of spatial locations into an idea of shape persists through changes of modality. Posed this way, Molyneux’s Question goes substantially (...) beyond question (a), about spatial locations, alone; for a positive answer to (a) leaves open whether a perceiver might cross-identify locations, but not be able to identify the shapes that collections of locations comprise. We further emphasize that MQ targets general ideas so as to distinguish it from corresponding questions about experiences of shape and about the property of tangible (vs. visual) shape. After proposing a generalized formulation of MQ, we extend earlier work (“Many Molyneux Questions,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 2020) by showing that MQ does not admit a single answer across the board. Some integrative data-processes transfer across modalities; others do not. Seeing where and how such transfer succeeds and fails in individual cases has much to offer to our understanding of perception and its modalities. (shrink)

The question examined in this study is not merely how a Nietzschean critique of law would look had Nietzsche ever applied his genealogical method to the question of law, but also what positive function Nietzschean philosophy may ascribe to law, and how law must then be transformed. The methodological parable imagines a “post-genealogy” or “pot-ressentiment” phase of the human condition, akin to the Marxist “post-revolutionary” phase: how would law look for the person of power - overman or otherwise - who (...) needs to live among others? How is normativity possible - what are its forms and functions - in a social world that has undergone a reevaluation of all values? The study traces three possible models for conceptualizing law in Nietzschean terms, each requiring a radical shift from traditional (in different contexts: liberal, Christian, bourgeois) conceptions. The first one is play: law as affirming and embracing the essence of the Dionysian, which is perpetual becoming. Play requires us to let go of law's role as the curtailer of arbitrariness. An integral part of the Nietzschean program, it requires a radical reevaluation: not just law's content is overcome, nor merely its bourgeois forms (in Pashukanis' critical terms), but its “internal” or “inherent” values of certitude and stability are overcome as well. The model I offer for play is not Zarathustra's dicethrow but Borges' The Lottery in Babylon. The second model is that of resistance, framed by Nietzsche's analysis of power and Deleuze's distinction between active and reactive forces. The insight here is that power requires resistance, and it is law's primary function to empower the other in order to invest value in meeting and confronting her; thus the monism of the will to power not only does not do away with normativity in the public sphere but actually requires it - but for goals opposite to those of liberalism. Resistance is linked to the third model, fashioned after Nietzsche's model of education: here, law performs not as a socializing agent but rather as a “liberator” of authenticity. Its function is analogous to that of a mentor whose role is to ultimately encourage the pupil into coming into her own will, shedding ressentiment and bad conscience in an active, i.e. non-conscious way; in its relation to consciousness it is the opposite of psychoanalysis. A fourth consideration is then offered, the role of normativity in self-overcoming, or self-legislating; namely, how does normativity figure in the will to power's most significant challenge. While all these models work from an interpretation of the will to power as becoming, the last two are especially dependent on the active-reactive distinction. The cornerstone is not to mix up power with representations of power; to realize that the case is not the will that desires power (as an object of desire, this would necessarily involve a representation of power) but power that wills becoming. In dealing with this metaphysical question I expound on a similar crucial interpretation, originally offered by Deleuze; however, I break off from Deleuze's claim that the will to power has nothing to do with any notion of struggle. If this discussion of the will to power is missed , or if it is wrong, the main argument of this article can not hold. Finally, I use this interpretation of the will to power to solve Kafka's riddle in The Trial: a necessary move once one realizes that, in the ethical history of western culture, Kafka's parable of the seeker of the law before its closed gates continues a sequence that began with Plato's fable of the cave and continued with Zarathustra's cave parable. I add three points that may be termed methodological or contextual. The first is positioning Nietzsche's limited discussion of law and politics as a derivative of his metaphysics of the will and treatment of moral psychology, not as an independent topic to be searched and indexed in some textual corpus. The second is to understand the question of normativity in its particularly Nietzschean sense, i.e. “what is X to me/to the overman?”, and not in the Kantian sense of uncovering the conditions that entail any synthetic, a-priori sentence (such as normative ones). The last comment places the Nietzschean project in a larger pattern that defined radical thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and whose other cases are Marx and Freud: a new metaphysics (will to power/materialism/id) that uncovers a state of bondage, psychological and material, in which law plays a pivotal role in its function of reinforcer and supplier of a legitimizing language (respectively, of ressentiment, of the relations of production, of Oedipus and the bourgeois family); and finally radical, yet partial ways of overcoming bondage that are not mutually translatable - genealogy, revolution, psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Consider the utterances ‘our friendship is valuable’ and ‘I value our friendship’. On the face of it, these aren’t semantic equivalents: the former ascribes a property to our friendship, whereas the latter reports something about how I relate to our friendship. In this short paper, I first outline Samuel Scheffler’s account of valuing and of the difference between valuing and considering valuable. I then propose an amendment to his account of valuing, one which concerns how we interact with our value-related (...) emotions. Subsequently, I argue against Scheffler’s view of the distribution of valuing and considering valuable in the world. While I don’t deny that considering valuable without valuing is conceptually possible and indeed instantiated, I disagree that it’s typical within our evaluative lives. Next, I consider an obvious response to my empirical claim and sketch a dilemma which accompanies that response. Finally, I highlight two limits of my empirical claim. (shrink)

Carl F. H. Henry serves as a fruitful resource for the integration of faith and learning. The central issue in Christian scholarship is to properly associate the revelation of God with the knowledge of God’s world across all academic disciplines. The particular effort of this article is to demonstrate the clarity Henry provides as it relates to general revelation, special revelation, and knowledge explored in a comprehensive university setting. Building on Henry’s clarity, an orientation of knowledge to Jesus Christ, a (...) proposal for the resulting vision for Christian scholarship, and habits of Christian educational institutions follows. (shrink)

Samantha Lay _British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit-Grit_ London: Wallflower Press, 2002 ISBN 1-903364-41-8 144 pp.

El artículo ofrece un análisis de algunos documentos que han llegado hasta nosotros, acerca de las muchas maneras en que los predecesores y contemporáneos latinos de Agustín interpretaron y aplicaron las difíciles afirmaciones que encontramos en Rm 2, 14-15.

One of the most famous stories in Ugaritic literature is the legend of Aqht that was found at Ras Shamra, Syria, during the early 1930s. Written in Ugaritic script and spread over three worn and broken tablets, this text has been thoroughly studied for the past eighty years. More than a few studies have dealt with the following questions: Is the end of the known text in the third tablet really the end of the story? Or is there perhaps a (...) missing tablet, or tablets, that continue the plot from the third tablet? These questions have been answered on the basis of storyline and plot, and many believe that there must have been more contents that complete this story and that it cannot end where the text ends. In this paper we have tried to answer this question based on epigraphic evidence found in the third tablet of the Aqht legend. After carefully examining four unique features of this tablet, we conclude that KTU 1.19 is, in fact, the last one of this specific sequence. We support this evidence by an analysis of the contents, showing that there is indeed enough text to suggest a proper closure for this legend. (shrink)

This essay, of course, is not about Bach’s musicology: it is about the partially overlapping stories of Bach and of contract. The overlap concerns the legal relations between the creative, entrepreneurial artist and the community he joined and resented; the tensions, ironies and contradictions—but also usefulness—of contract as a way to tell and reinterpret movement along the proverbial “status to contract” narrative of modernity; what Bach found there, and how this may serve as both a specific story of artistic genius (...) in the shadow of law and a case study for the contractual organization of relations in a transformative period of early modernity. (shrink)

This paper discusses issues relating to the normativity of prescriptive rules: what does it mean for a rule to be able to direct action, and what are the implications for the desirability of rule-based decision-making? It is argued that: cognitively, one must allow for more than a single answer to the first question ; and normatively, these different structures typically serve for different purposes in allocation of power and discretion. The next issue is the connection between rule-based decision-making and semantic (...) theories of language. On a meta-discursive level, the paper makes a twofold claim: that normative discourse is possible only on the basis of a sound cognitive inquiry, while cognitive inquiry alone is not sufficient to explain social action and interaction, lacking tools to deal with the contingent normative demands from decision-making systems, such as adjudication. The discussion of prescriptive rules serves as a case-study for this claim. These and related topics have been dealt with by Frederick Schauer. His model of rules as entrenched generalizations and mediators between "justifications " and action is the starting point of the present discussion, which, on most of the issues mentioned above, results in conclusions quite different from Schauer's. (shrink)

This thought-provoking Research Handbook provides a snapshot of current research on natural law theory in ethics, politics and law, showcasing the breadth and diversity of contemporary natural law thought. The Research Handbook on Natural Law Theory examines topics such as foundational figures in Western natural law theory, natural law ideas in a variety of religious and cultural traditions, normative foundations of natural law, as well as issues of law and governance. Featuring contributions by leading international scholars, this Research Handbook offers (...) a valuable resource for scholars in law, philosophy, religious studies and related fields. (shrink)

This book addresses the challenges of living together after empire in many post-colonial cities. It is organized in two sections. The first section focuses on efforts by people of multiple faiths to live together within their contexts, including such efforts within a neighborhood in urban Manchester; the array of attempts at creating multi-faith spaces for worship across the globe; and initiatives to commemorate divisive conflict together in Northern Ireland. The second section utilizes particular postcolonial methods to illuminate pressing issues within (...) specific contexts—including women’s leadership in an indigenous denomination in the variegated African landscape, and baptism and discipleship among Dalit communities in India. In the context of growing multiculturalism in the West, this volume offers a postcolonial theological resource, challenging the epistemologies in the Western academy. (shrink)

This book provides a critical introduction to François Laruelle’s writings on photography, with a particular focus on his two most important books on photography: The Concept of Non-Photography and Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics. By unpacking and contextualising these works, this study provides a useful starting point for students and scholars who want to better understand Laruelle’s larger project, which he calls “non-philosophy”, or more recently, “non-standard philosophy”. With clear and concise explanations of the basics of non-philosophy, Laruelle and Non-Photography demonstrates (...) how Laruelle's thought challenges standard, philosophical approaches to photography, and culminates in a novel theory of "non-photography.". (shrink)

I summarize the history of twentieth-century theorizing about history by historians and by philosophers of different traditions. I clarify the nature of ‘analytical’ philosophy, with philosophical arguments imagined to exist in a shared atemporal space. Analytical philosophy of history largely presupposed David Hume’s empiricism, explicit in Carl Hempel’s 1942 analysis of historical explanation as causal. Others argued for reasons instead, but by 1965 analytical philosophers were analysing historical narratives. Many theorists were unclear about the nature of philosophical method, and ‘empathizing’ (...) with them is fruitful. Empathy is here analysed as shared imagination, where the space imagined is not atemporal but time-extended. Making meaningful sense of our shared world requires the denial of Hume’s view that ‘complexes’ are built entirely out of ‘simples’, and we can think of historical narratives as units of time-extended empirical significance. That we can make our world is argued for and illustrated. (shrink)

One of the greatest challenges in teaching an introductory philosophy course is convincing students that there are, indeed, reliable standards for the evaluation of arguments. Too often introductory students criticize an argument simply by contesting the truth of one of its claims. And far too often, the only claim in an argument that meets serious objections is its conclusion. For many students, the idea that an argument displays a structure which can be evaluated on its own terms is not very (...) difficult to grasp. Unfortunately, the idea is grasped only in an abstract way, with insufficient appreciation of how structural problems manifest themselves in concrete arguments, and without the vocabulary for formulating structural criticisms. But this paper is not simply about teaching logic, it is about pedagogy. Our task is to instill in the student the habit of clear thinking. When we send our students out into the world, we have to ensure that they are prepared for it. (shrink)

Rowan Williams has consistently given expression to Christian faith in surprising and genera-tive ways, especially through the language of ‘excess’ and through contemplating the excess in the narrative and identity of Christ. By attending to the grammar of excess, this essay draws out elements of the metaphysics of holiness in dialogue with Williams. I ask how creaturely being can be sustained by the holiness which generates all things without leaving holiness so ubiq-uitous as to be either trivial or hidden. I (...) respond to this problem by arguing that holy lives and communities make visible the ontological dependence of all things on God. Finally, this pro-vides a way of recognizing the value of the metaphysical imagination in the pursuit of holiness. (shrink)

In this article, I demonstrate that recruitment of hoplites under the katalogos system was not defined simply by the state's capacity to coerce citizens into taking up arms; rather, publication of the names of citizens chosen for military service is a practice that reflects the complementary ethics of egoistic, rivalrous competition and communitarian duty that animated the democratic polis.

Freedom, and in particular, the freedom of human beings, is a hot topic within the field of metaphysics. In this paper, instead of arguing for the truth of a particular position on freedom, I explore whether a particular position, compatibilism, might be consistent with the existence of moral responsibility and retributive justice. To alleviate ambiguity, I construct a model by which the four primary positions on freedom might be clearly understood. I then distinguish between what I call ‘common-sense’ views of (...) moral responsibility, and ‘complex’ views of moral responsibility. I select a particular complex view, which I term the ‘virtue’ theory of moral responsibility, offer some justification for the sensibility of such a theory, and demonstrate how the virtue theory is consistent with compatibilism. Finally, I propose that retributive justice is consistent with the virtue theory of moral responsibility, and consequently, that retributive justice is consistent with compatibilism. (shrink)

This article is a clarification and development of my interpretation of Sartre’s theory of bad faith in response to Ronald Santoni’s sophisticated critique, published in this issue. It begins by clarifying Sartre’s conception of a project and explaining his claim that one project is fundamental, thereby elucidating the idea that bad faith is a fundamental project. This forms the groundwork of my responses to Santoni’s critique of my interpretation, which comprises four arguments: Sartre does not consider us to be ontologically (...) and congenitally disposed to bad faith; Santoni is right that social pressure cannot explain the prevalence of bad faith, but this is a problem with Sartre’s theory rather than a problem for my interpretation of it; Sartre’s conception of seriousness is merely an optional strategy of bad faith; and Sartre is right to deny that bad faith is an inherently cynical project. (shrink)

'It is going to change the way in which we understand many modern debates about economics, politics, and society' Ha Joon Chang, author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism Over the past fifty years, the way we value what is 'good' and 'right' has changed dramatically. Behaviour that to our grandparents' generation might have seemed stupid, harmful or simply wicked now seems rational, natural, woven into the very logic of things. And, asserts Jonathan Aldred in this (...) revelatory new book, it's economics that's to blame.Licence to be Bad tells the story of how a group of economics theorists changed our world, and how a handful of key ideas, from free-riding to Nudge, seeped into our decision-making and, indeed, almost all aspects of our lives. Aldred reveals the extraordinary hold of economics on our morals and values. Economics has corrupted us. But if this hidden transformation is so recent, it can be reversed. Licence to be Bad shows us where to begin. (shrink)