There are many cases in which people collectively cause some morally significant outcome (such as a harmful or beneficial outcome) but no individual act seems to make a difference. The problem in such cases is that it seems each person can argue, ‘it makes no difference whether or not I do X, so I have no reason to do it.’ The challenge is to say where this argument goes wrong. My approach begins from the observation that underlying the problem and (...) motivating the typical responses to it is a standard, intuitive assumption. The assumption is that if an act will not make a difference with respect to an outcome, then it cannot play a sig- nificant, non-superfluous role in bringing that outcome about. In other words, helping to bring about an outcome requires making a difference. I argue that the key to solving the problem is to reject this assumption. I develop an account of what it is to help to bring about an outcome, where this does not require making a difference, and I use this explain our reasons for action in the problem cases. This account also yields an error theory that explains why the standard assumption is so tempting, even though it is mistaken. (shrink)

Twenty-five years after her death, we are still coming to terms with the controversial figure of Hannah Arendt. Interlacing the life and work of this seminal twentieth-century philosopher, Julia Kristeva provides us with an elegant, sophisticated biography brimming with historical and philosophical insight. Centering on the theme of female genius, _Hannah Arendt_ emphasizes three features of the philosopher's work. First, by exploring Arendt's critique of Saint Augustine and her biographical essay on Rahel Varnhagen, Kristeva accentuates Arendt's commitment to recounting (...) lives and narration. Second, Kristeva reflects on Arendt's perspective on Judaism, anti-Semitism, and the "banality of evil." Finally, the biography assesses Arendt's intellectual journey, placing her enthusiasm for observing both social phenomena and political events in the context of her personal life. Drawing on fragments of Arendt's most intimate correspondence with her longtime lover Martin Heidegger and her husband Heinrich Blucher, excerpts from her mother's "Unser Kind" (a diary tracking Hannah's formative years), and passages from Arendt's philosophical writings, Kristeva presents a luminous story. With a thorough thematic index and bibliographical references, _Hannah Arendt_ is a major breakthrough in the understanding of an essential thinker. (shrink)

Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Her writings have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language. Her work is unique in that it skillfully brings together psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, literature, linguistics, and philosophy. In her latest book on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Kristeva focuses on an intriguing new dilemma. Freud (...) and psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in our contemporary "entertainment" culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom--and against what--and under what forms? Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist John Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. For Kristeva the rebellions championed by these figures--especially the political and seemingly dogmatic political commitments of Aragon and Sartre--strike the post-Cold War reader with a mixture of fascination and rejection. These theorists, according to Kristeva, are involved in a revolution against accepted notions of identity--of one's relation to others. Kristeva places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics. The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in his _Totem and Taboo_ and discussing his often neglected vision of language, and underscoring its complex connection to the revolutionary drive. (shrink)

Although Gilbert Ryle published on a wide range of topics in philosophy (notably in the history of philosophy and in philosophy of language), including a series of lectures centred on philosophical dilemmas, a series of articles on the concept of thinking, and a book on Plato, The Concept of Mind remains his best known and most important work. Through this work, Ryle is thought to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he was seen to have put the final nail in (...) the coffin of Cartesian dualism. Second, as he himself anticipated, he is thought to have argued on behalf of, and suggested as dualism's replacement, the doctrine known as philosophical (and sometimes analytical) behaviourism. Sometimes known as an “ordinary language”, sometimes as an “analytic” philosopher, Ryle—even when mentioned in the same breath as Wittgenstein and his followers—is considered to be on a different, somewhat idiosyncratic (and difficult to characterise), philosophical track. (shrink)

Trust and corporation (extracts) / by F.W. Maitland -- Respublica Christiana -- by J.N. Figgis -- Society and state / by R.M. MacIver -- The discredited state / by E. Barker -- Conflicting social obligations / by G.D.H. Cole -- Community is a process / by M.P. Follett -- The eruption of the group / by E. Barker -- The masses in a representative democracy / by M. Oakeshott -- The atavism of social justice / by F.A. von Hayek -- (...) Collective entities and moral rights / by V. van Dyke -- Capitalism, citizenship and community / by S. Macedo -- Liberalism and the politicization of ethnicity / by W. Kymlicka -- Are there any cultural rights? / by C. Kukathas -- The civil society argument / by M. Walzer. (shrink)

O teórico Michael Löwy afirmou que o campo científico é social e politicamente condicionado, não sendo viável estabelecer um distanciamento entre ciência e ideologia. No atual momento, é possível visualizar a clareza dessa afirmação, na medida em que o campo científico se demonstra obstruído diante do cenário político vivenciado. O pensamento crítico e problematizador é tido como um perigo eminente perante a conjuntura conservadora e antidemocrática que se acentua. Com isso, a produção de pensamento crítico e o posicionamento de resistência, (...) diante da formação conservadora, assume a denominação de doutrinação, e o debate gerador de reflexão tende a ser calado, sobretudo se não confirmar a lógica dominante. Ao compreendermos a necessidade de reafirmar o teor questionador da produção de conhecimento, como elemento central na formação social, entende-se sua relevância na construção de um caminho democrático do pensamento social. Neste trabalho, buscamos levantar reflexões a partir de uma revisão bibliográfica, procurando entender produção de conhecimento em um período de anti-intelectualismo. Em contraposição ao conceito positivista de neutralidade do conhecimento, pretende-se investigar a relação dialética entre representação política e formação intelectual. Nossa concepção de pesquisa científica situa-se em um campo que não é neutro, mas permeado de diferentes concepções de mundo, de ser humano e de conhecimento, bem como engendrada por relações que ocorrem entre sujeitos, que propendem a produzir conhecimentos científicos a partir do seu lugar social, um lugar suficientemente privilegiado. Este trabalho se propõe examinar essas questões, ao referenciar a formação social como aspecto determinante na produção de conhecimento. Aponta-se à figura do intelectual orgânico como elemento essencial para pensar essa questão, ao salientar a contraposição ao retrocesso científico imposto no último período e a valorização do pensamento crítico, mais do que nunca como pensamento que resiste no campo da pesquisa e diante do sistema produtivista que o concebe. (shrink)

Until relatively recently, researchers believed that synaesthetic sensations and their triggers were arbitrarily paired, and entirely idiosyncratic from one synaesthete to the next. Put differently, they believed that no two synaesthetes would have similar experiences from the same set of triggers, unless this had occurred by chance. This position likely arose because, prior to the internet, it was extremely difficult to recruit more than a small handful of synaesthete participants, and on the surface, synaesthetes do tend to disagree on their (...) associations when compared one-on-one. However, recent advances in communication have allowed researchers access to far larger groups of synaesthete participants, and this has changed our opinion about how similar synaesthetes might in fact be. A dedicated body of research has now shown that synaesthetic associations are built, to some extent, on a set of unconscious 'rules', shared across synaesthetes. These rules dictate the choice of sensation for certain triggers, and allow us to see patterns emerging which, although not absolute, provide a type of coherence across synaesthetes as a whole. I shall also show that some of these underlying rules operate in the population at large, to allow all individuals to make intuitive pairings across the senses. This chapter describes some of these rules, across a range of different modalities, and across different variants of synaesthesia. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle was one of the most important and controversial philosophers of the Twentieth century. Long unavailable, Critical Essays: Collected Papers Volume 1 includes many of Ryle’s most important and thought-provoking papers. This volume contains 20 critical essays on the history of philosophy, with writing on Plato, Locke and Hume as well as important chapters on Russell and Wittgenstein. It also includes three essays on phenomenology, including Ryle’s famous review of Martin.

The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States, though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian (...) "deconstructivism" though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness: psychoanalysis—not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and, perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event .For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and "revolutionaries"—in all cases, jealous guardians of their academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:1. There are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning. This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation.3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art and About Chinese Women.Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du langage poétique. (shrink)

German theologian F. D. E. Schleiermacher's doctrine of God-the first to be developed in the post-Kantian era-fundamentally changed the course of Christian theology. The degree to which his doctrine of God was influenced by the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza remains in dispute, however. This study examines the ways in which Schleiermacher actively adopted elements of Spinoza's thought in the development of his own theological doctrine of God. Julia Lamm's analysis of little-known but seminal essays by Schleiermacher reveals his (...) young creative genius in daring to go beyond the neo-Spinozism of Herder and the post-Kantianism of Fichte by developing his own post-Kantian Spinozism. Schleiermacher's unique simultaneous appropriation of Kant and Spinoza is characterized by four themes: an organic monism, an ethical determinism, a critical realism, and a nonanthropomorphic view of God, which Lamm traces through his two major theological works, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers and The Christian Faith. Ultimately, Lamm finds that Schleiermacher departs from Spinoza in significant ways. Most notably, he talks about "the living God" who is best expressed through the divine attributes of love and wisdom. This living God is what Schleiermacher refers to as the "third alternative" to, on the one hand, the anthropomorphized God of orthodox Protestantism and, on the other hand, Spinoza's natura naturans. (shrink)

Warum sind unsere Daten und das Private schützenswert? Diese Frage stellt sich insbesondere in Zeiten der vierten Industriellen Revolution, des Internets der Dinge und des politischen Wandels. Julia Maria Mönig zeigt, dass Hannah Arendts Anliegen, das Private unbedingt zu bewahren, von ihrem Verständnis des antiken Haushalts bis hin zur Verletzung der informationellen Privatheit im Totalitarismus aufschlussreiche Einsichten in aktuelle Debatten - etwa über Cybermobbing - liefert. Das Buch richtet sich an Philosoph_innen ebenso wie an Datenschützer_innen und Privatheitsforscher_innen verschiedener Disziplinen (...) sowie an alle, die sich über die Zukunft und Gegenwart der Demokratie Gedanken machen. (shrink)

This essay argues that the logical significance of most natural language expressions is indefinitely elastic. This, it is argued, undermines the idea that the meaning of a word is an item for which it stands, and puts pressure on the methods of conceptual analysis and theoretical elucidation that require context-invariant stable application conditions. Furthermore, it is argued that the insistence that such semantic content is needed which—impervious to local pragmatic concerns—remains stable and available for reasoning, gets things back to front. (...) For in order to determine the correct inflection of any given use of an expression, its inferential relations—in the context of an utterance—must already be discerned. The lack of contextually independent content, however, presents no mystery about language use. For the ability to understand what is said is explained not only by shared practices and common interests, but also by the capacity for interlocutors to ask questions and explain what they mean. (shrink)

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, _The Severed Head_ unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--_the power of horror_--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva (...) considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper aims at exposing a strategy to organize the debate around physicalism. Our starting point is the pre-philosophical notion of physicalism, which is typically formulated in the form of slogans. Indeed, philosophers debating metaphysics have paradigmatically introduced the subject with aid of slogans such as “there is nothing over and above the physical”, “once every physical aspect of the world is settled, every other aspect will follow”, “physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical”. These ideas are very (...) intuitive but they are, of course, far from being a satisfactory metaphysical conception of Physicalism. For that end, we will begin with the definition of physicalism as the thesis that everything is physical, following Stoljar, we should be able to respond to one central question: how to interpret the physicalist claim that everything in physical. (shrink)

Confucius became a subject for visual representation after the Han court formally endorsed his teachings, and his earliest images appeared in schools and offering shrines. As his official cult evolved, and until the 1530 ritual reform, iconic portraits of Confucius and his disciples received offerings in temples throughout China. During the Song period, his portrayals became more diverse, and some reproduced pictures kept by his Kong descendants in Qufu曲阜and Quzhou衢州. Attributions to the Tang painter Wu Daozi 吳道子became customary and persistent, (...) despite tenuous connections. Until the 20th century, images of Confucius primarily concerned the literate elite, for whom he was an exemplar of moral cultivation. Pictorial biographies of Confucius, made in considerable numbers from the middle Ming onward, brought him more vividly to life and to a wider range of society. In recent decades, new images of Confucius have evolved to serve a range of contemporary purposes. (shrink)

Reviews the book 'The Mechanical Mind - A Philosophical Introduction to Minds, Machines and Mental Representation,' by Tim Cranes.

Este trabajo aborda algunos de los últimos registros de Rubén Darío, para señalar cómo su obra socava la modernidad latinoamericana, más allá de cómo se ha entendido y se ha practicado tradicionalmente, incluso por él mismo, suturando mundos que seguimos sin consolidar.

Today, the centenary of the “Philosophy Steamer” does not feel like a hundred-year-old event. Most contemporaries learned about it little more than thirty years ago from Literaturnaia gazeta, which...

This article discusses development of the content of the concept “Philosophy Steamer,” which refers to the 1922 expulsion from Russia of a group of intelligentsia who sharply criticized the authorities. The author shows that the group of exiled philosophers was united both by their previous philosophical and social activity and by their joint activity as émigrés. She analyzes the concepts of “historical collective individuality,” “collective person,” and “communal person” introduced by Lev P. Karsavin in order to determine the holistic nature (...) of this exiled social group and its characteristic self-consciousness, behavior, aspirations, and feelings (moods). Examining the event known as the “Philosophy Steamer” through the concepts listed above allows the author to cognize the historical, social, and cultural reality more broadly and productively. The article demonstrates that the concept of a collective person can also be applied to other social groups, thereby extending the methodology of human-studies cognition beyond the study of facts and statistical data. (shrink)

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a grassroots response to the threat the global industrial agri-food system poses to smallholders. The degrowth community, calling for a radical transformation away from the environmentally destructive and socially unjust primacy of economic growth in current societies, has started to pay tribute to CSA, commonly considering it an embodiment of degrowth ideas. However, the CSA movement does not reciprocate the interest of the degrowth community. This article therefore undertakes a systematic analysis of the potential for a (...) coalition between CSA and degrowth in Germany. We draw on social movement theories to compare both movements’ ideological and strategic alignment, as well as the conducive and/or hindering factors for coalition building. We find that the ideologies and political strategies of the two movements are not aligned, which manifests in their main frames and action repertoires, among other areas, which are articulated at different levels of abstraction; CSA has a practical focus on the safeguarding of smallholder agriculture, while degrowth more abstractly centres on the growth-dependent economy. Scarce resources, differing forms of internal organisation, and a lack of knowledge about degrowth on the side of CSA represent further obstacles to entering a coalition. At the same time, our analysis shows existing social ties and an initial ideological alignment between the CSA movement and sufficiency-oriented degrowth. We conclude that, despite prevailing differences, the two movements seem complementary, and that entering a coalition would bring with it the benefits of combining practice- and discourse-driven social change. (shrink)

Increasing complexity and specialisation of modern sciences has led to increasingly collaborative publications, as well as the involvement of commercial services. Modern integrative taxonomy likewise depends on many lines of evidence and is increasingly complex, but the trend of collaboration lags and various attempts at ‘turbo taxonomy’ have been unsatisfactory. We are developing a taxonomic service in the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance to provide fundamental data for new species descriptions. This will also function as a hub to connect a global (...) network of taxonomists, assembling an alliance of scientists working on potential new species to tackle both the extinction and inclusion crises we face today. The current rate of new species descriptions is simply too slow; the discipline is often dismissed as old fashioned, and there is a crisis level need for taxonomic descriptions to come to grips with the scale of Anthropocene biodiversity loss. Here, we envision how the process of describing and naming species would benefit from a service supporting the acquisition of descriptive data. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/E8q3KJor_F8. (shrink)

The article analyzes the rationale for S.I. Hessen’s idea of transcendental empiricism, which highlights the issue of the individual and makes it “the fundamental bedrock of truth.” The author also discusses Hessen’s understanding of individual causality and its forms in the process of cognition of historical reality.

The aim of this study was to verify whether chimpanzees demonstrate an auditory laterality during the orientation reaction, and which hemisphere is responsible for processing the emotional stimuli and which for the species-specific vocalizations. The study involved nine chimpanzees from the Warsaw Municipal Zoological Garden. They were tested individually in their bedrooms. Chimpanzees approached a tube filled with food, located in the centre of the cage. Randomly selected sounds were played from the speakers when the subject was focused on getting (...) food. Individual reactions were observed and outcomes reported. The four types of sound used: thunderstorm, dog barking, chimpanzee vocalization and a zookeeper’s voice. To test whether chimpanzees demonstrate auditory laterality we used a single sample X2 test. The existence of auditory laterality has been confirmed. The sound of the storm caused the orientation reaction to the left, while chimpanzee vocalization - to the right. On this basis we can conclude that among chimpanzees, arousing stimuli are being processed by the right hemisphere, and species-specific vocalizations by the left. However, the set of stimuli was limited so the study did not unequivocally resolve this issue. (shrink)

Beyond Contractual Morality looks at current debates over the meaning of liberalism by reexamining their roots in eighteenth-century texts, which demonstrate ...

Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 masterpiece Nostalghia allows us to rethink our ordinary notion of nostalgia and move beyond the idea of nostalgia as sentimental longing for the past, the fruitless yearning that allows us to avoid living in the present. The film suggests that nostalgia can help us notice that which is not a part of our current situation and to introduce new threads into the fabric of our world. Because of nostalgia, we become aware of perforations in the existing order (...) of things and, as a result, become capable of altering the status quo. The protagonist of Tarkovsky’s film, Gorchakov, a Russian poet visiting Italy, shows us that nostalgia is a violent voyage that never leads home but only helps us find and found a new–and always temporary–dwelling place. Nostalgia, then, is a journey to the home that never was, but to the home that might be. The final sequence of the film beautifully confirms this by placing Gorchakov next to his Russian home that turns out to be inside the ruins of the Cistercian abbey of San Galgano in Italy. This cinematic merging of two very different places and cultures creates a new world for Gorchakov and asks us to continue creating the places in which we happen to find ourselves today. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit dem “Fall Thompson” – einem kaum erforschten Streitfall innerhalb der Anglikanischen Kirche und der wissenschaftlichen Theologie über die Zulässigkeit der Kritik an zentralen Bekenntnisinhalten vom Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts. Die Verfasserin rekonstruiert sowohl die akademisch-theologische Diskussion über Thompsons umstrittene Veröffentlichung als auch die komplexen rechtlich-formalen Vorgänge innerhalb des Magdalen Colleges in Oxford. Der Fall illustriert exemplarisch den Konflikt zwischen liberalen und konservativen Theologen über die Grundlagen des christlichen Glaubens, der den westeuropäischen Protestantismus im 19. und (...) 20. Jahrhundert spaltete. (shrink)

[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativity of judgement is made (...) possible by naturalist views of truth, that is, views which do not presuppose normativity in explaining truth. /// [Julia Tanney] This paper attempts to describe why it is not possible to account for normative phenomena in non-normative terms. It argues that Papineau's attempt to locate norms of judgement 'outside' content, grounded in an individual's desires or reasons, mislocates the normativity that is thought to resist appropriation within a 'world that conceives nature as the realm of law'. It agrees, however, that a theory of content that locates norms 'inside' content will not be forthcoming-at least if this is to require fashioning the norms that in some sense govern judgment or thought into individually necessary conditions for contentful states. (shrink)

[David Papineau] This paper disputes the common assumption that the normativity of conceptual judgement poses a problem for naturalism. My overall strategy is to argue that norms of judgement derive from moral or personal values, particularly when such values are attached to the end of truth. While there are philosophical problems associated with both moral and personal values, they are not special to the realm of judgement, nor peculiar to naturalist philosophies. This approach to the normativity of judgement is made (...) possible by naturalist views of truth, that is, views which do not presuppose normativity in explaining truth. /// [Julia Tanney] This paper attempts to describe why it is not possible to account for normative phenomena in non-normative terms. It argues that Papineau's attempt to locate norms of judgement 'outside' content, grounded in an individual's desires or reasons, mislocates the normativity that is thought to resist appropriation within a 'world that conceives nature as the realm of law'. It agrees, however, that a theory of content that locates norms 'inside' content will not be forthcoming-at least if this is to require fashioning the norms that in some sense govern judgment or thought into individually necessary conditions for contentful states. (shrink)

This essay defends moral expertise against the skeptical considerations raised by Gilbert Ryle and others. The core of the essay articulates an account of moral expertise that draws on work on expertise in empirical moral psychology, and develops an analogy between moral expertise and linguistic expertise. The account holds that expertise is contrastive, so that a person is an expert relative to a particular contrast. Further, expertise is domain specific and characterized by “automatic” behavior and judgment. Some disagreements in the (...) literature regarding moral expertise are diagnosed as being due to failures to adequately distinguish different ways in which someone can be a moral expert. For example, expertise in action does not imply expertise in judgment or analysis. (shrink)

Some years ago I started to write a book on virtue ethics, in which I tried to meet early criticisms of what was then a new way of doing ethics. The book continued to be unsatisfactory, and I finally abandoned it, realizing that I needed to get clear about virtue before producing a defence of virtue ethics. This need should have been obvious, especially since I frequently teach Platonic dialogues where Socrates gets people to see that they are doing what (...) I was doing, namely developing ideas about something without first examining what it is. The need became even more obvious as the field rapidly expanded with the production of Humean, Nietschean, Kantian and consequentialist kinds of virtue ethics. Within the field of neo-Aristotelian ethics itself it became clear that different aspects can be stressed: the importance of practical wisdom can be developed, for example, without defending a naturalistic account of the relation of virtue to happiness.I finally wrote a book to explore and d .. (shrink)

The format of this volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series provides for a detailed interaction between those who interpret and critique Julia Kristeva's work and Kristeva herself, giving broad coverage, from diverse viewpoints, of all the major topics establishing her reputation. This work begins with her autobiography, which provides an excellent introduction to her work, situating it in relation to major political, intellectual, and cultural movements of the time. The major part of the book is comprised of (...) thirty-six essays by Kristeva's foremost interpreters and critics, together with her replies to the essays. These encounters cover an exceptionally wide range of theoretical and literary writing. The strong international and multidisciplinary focus includes authors from over ten countries, and spans the fields of philosophy, semiotics, literature, psychoanalysis, feminist thought, political theory, art, and religion. A comprehensive bibliography of works by Kristeva is included. (shrink)