Who owns nature? The question could be less important than reducing animal sufferings in nature. It does not matter if nature does not belong to anyone or if it belongs to someone, because in both cases there are limitations, linked with animal welfare, regarding what we should do in nature. Sentient beings have interests that we must take into account when designing environmental policies. Since neither ecosystems nor plants have interests, preserving nature is less important than reducing animal sufferings. The (...) relevant moral issue is, therefore, knowing what happens to sentient animals in nature and developing policies to reduce their sufferings. This implies that we have the moral obligation of intervening in nature with the aim of reducing animal sufferings, so conservationist environmental policies defended by ecologists are morally unacceptable. (shrink)

The great problem in writing a theory of everything is that it may turn out to be a theory of nothing. Here is how it works. If you develop a theory that only explains some small, simple Thing, then the theory is very strong. It is precise, understandable, and it always works. As you expand the theory to encompass another Thing, it becomes weaker. It may still be precise and understandable, but it is now more complicated, and because it involves (...) two things rather than one, it starts to become conditional. This means that in order for it to work with regard to the second Thing, we may have to take into account something about the first Thing. And so it goes. As the theory covers more and more Things, it becomes less precise, less understandable, and parts need to be added on in order cover multiple contingencies. People who go down this path inevitably come to a critical point, at which their theory has become so precisely complicated that it can barely be understood, and gargantuan efforts become necessary to make it work at all. To resolve this impasse, they have a terminological epiphany. They suddenly find a language (that is, an arcane vocabulary) which confers the appearance of simplicity to the morass they have created. Precision is replaced by undefined terms and relationships, described in forceful but impenetrable prose. Argumentation becomes not an activity of rational thought, but a magical experience in which a swirling array of undefined concepts assembles itself in just the right way to come to whatever conclusion is desired. In the mouth of its inventor the theory does indeed explain everything, but in the ears of the audience it explains nothing. (shrink)

Richard Beardsmore once argued that, although it is possible for atheists and religious believers alike to regard life as a gift, the regarding of one's own death as a gift is open only to the (Christian) believer. I discuss this interesting contention, and argue that, notwithstanding some important differences between the attitudinal possibilities available to atheists and believers in God, there are at least three senses in which an atheist could regard death as a gift. Two of these involve death's (...) being conceived as serving some particular purpose, whereas the third derives from a more pervasive affirmatory attitude to life as a whole. (shrink)

D.Z. Phillips’ work in the philosophy of religion continues to be criticised, often on the basis of serious misunderstandings. By engaging with criticisms of Phillips’ Wittgenstein-influenced approach, especially those recently exemplified by Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis, this article seeks to clarify what Phillips’ approach does and does not involve. Focusing on the relation between talk of God’s reality and talk of matters of fact, and on the question whether God is a ‘metaphysical reality’, the extent to which Phillips himself (...) emphasised the need for close attention to how language is used in real-life situations is highlighted, and the persistent mischaracterisation of Phillips as a ‘non-realist’ is rejected. (shrink)

Con este artículo pretendemos esbozar los fundamentos onto-lógicos esenciales de la propuesta metafísica de Alain Badiou; así como identificar los nexos dialécticos imprescindibles para la elaboración de lo que podemos considerar una metafísica contemporánea de lo múltiple infinito –frente a las clásicas metafísicas dogmáticas de lo Uno y las filosofías de la finitud– que incorpora de un modo dialécticamente inclusivo la matemática de la teoría de conjuntos, en _L’être et l’événement_, y la lógica matematizada de la teoría de categorías, en (...) _Logiques des mondes_. Sin adentrarnos en los pormenores de los conceptos vehiculares necesarios para pensar los procedimientos de verdad de la propuesta de Badiou, veremos cómo las relaciones dialécticas que se establecen a nivel onto-lógico en el interior de esta nueva metafísica concentran toda la historicidad del pensamiento de las correlaciones clásicas ser/aparecer, o ser/ser-ahí, univocidad/equivocidad, objeto/relación, extrínseco/intrínseco, lógica binaria/lógica trascendental y matemática/lógica en el pensamiento filosófico de la relación dialéctica contemporánea entre la teoría de conjuntos y la teoría de categorías. (shrink)

An increasingly common complaint about philosophy of religion—especially, though not exclusively, as it is pursued in the “analytic tradition”—is that its preoccupation with questions of rationality and justification in relation to “theism” has deflected attention from the diversity of forms that religious life takes. Among measures proposed for ameliorating this condition has been the deployment of “thick description” that facilitates more richly contextualized understandings of religious phenomena. Endorsing and elaborating this proposal, I provide an overview of different but related notions (...) of thick description before turning to two specific examples, which illustrate the potential for engagement with ethnography to contribute to an expanded conception of philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an outstanding 20th-century philosopher whose influence has reverberated throughout not only philosophy but also numerous other areas of inquiry, including theology and the study of religions. Exemplifying how Wittgenstein's thought can be engaged with both sympathetically and critically, Wittgenstein, Religion and Ethics pushes forward our thinking about religion and ethics and their place in the modern world. Bringing Wittgenstein's ideas into productive dialogue with several other important thinkers, including Elizabeth Anscombe, St Thomas Aquinas, Georg Cantor, Søren Kierkegaard (...) and George Orwell, this collection fosters a highly informative picture of how different strands of contemporary and historical thought intersect and bear upon one another. Chapters are written by leading scholars in the field and tackle current debates concerning religious and ethical matters, with particular attention to the nature of religious language. This is a substantial contribution to religion and ethics, demonstrating the significance of Wittgenstein's ideas for these and related subjects. (shrink)

Rebirth and the Stream of Life explores the diversity as well as the ethical and religious significance of rebirth beliefs, focusing especially on Hindu and Buddhist traditions but also discussing indigenous religions and ancient Greek thought. Utilizing resources from religious studies, anthropology and theology, an expanded conception of philosophy of religion is exemplified, which takes seriously lived experience rather than treating religious beliefs in isolation from their place in believers' lives. Drawing upon his expertise in interdisciplinary working and Wittgenstein-influenced approaches, (...) Mikel Burley examines several interrelated phenomena, including purported past-life memories, the relationship between metaphysics and ethics, efforts to 'demythologize' rebirth, and moral critiques of the doctrine of karma. This range of topics, with rebirth as a unifying theme, makes the book of value to anyone interested in philosophy, the study of religions, and what it means to believe that we undergo multiple lives. (shrink)

Abstract: Critics of Havi Carel's 2008 book, Illness: The Cry of the Flesh, have contended that Carel's deployment of phenomenological philosophy adds little to commonsense views about illness and that Carel relies too heavily on emotion-laden autobiographical anecdotes. Against these contentions this article argues: first, that a perfectly respectable task of philosophy is to find reasons to support pre-existing beliefs; and secondly, that Carel's use of anecdotes, while certainly appealing to readers' emotions, constitutes part of a legitimate argumentative strategy. The (...) article links these proposals with broader debates concerning the proper task of philosophy and the role of emotionality and imagination in philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

"This collection of essays on aesthetics is the first set of Dufrenne's shorter pieces to appear in English. It is arranged thematically and includes works from as early as 1948 to as late as 1974.... In these essays Dufrenne covers a lot of ground and draws into his discussion of aesthetics a whole range of thinkers, including Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, Metz, Freud and Derrida.... These essays are well worth reading both for the quality of the writing and for the continual (...) insights which come to the surface along the way. The text has been devotedly translated and a helpful introduction has been added." -- David Pollard, British Journal of Aesthetics. (shrink)

In his article 'The Evil of Death' (henceforth: ED) Harry Silverstein argues that a proper refutation of the Epicurean view that death is not an evil requires the adoption of a particular revisionary ontology, which Silverstein, following Quine, calls 'four-dimensionalism'.1 In 'The Evil of Death Revisited' (henceforth: EDR) Silverstein reaffirms his earlier position and responds to several criticisms, including some targeted at his ontology. There remain, however, serious problems with Silverstein's argument, and I shall highlight five major ones below. I (...) conclude that Silverstein has not shown that an appeal to four-dimensionalism facilitates a refutation of Epicurus, although a consideration of some of Silverstein's points helps to indicate the limited scope of the Epicurean thesis. (shrink)

Pour l'homme, initialement publie en 1968, marque un moment important dans l'uvre de Mikel Dufrenne (1910-1995). Reconnu jusqu'alors comme un des grands representants de l'esthetique francaise, le philosophe ouvre avec cet "essai" un nouveau sillon, dans lequel s'inscriront ensuite Art et politique (1974) et Subversion, perversion (1977). Il s'agit pour lui de se tourner vers ses contemporains et de s'expliquer avec eux, de prendre acte de l'avenement du concept de structure dans les sciences humaines et la philosophie, et de (...) contester que cet avenement doive s'accompagner de l'effacement de la figure de l'homme, comme si la mort de l'homme devait succeder a celle de Dieu. Pour l'homme ne represente pas pour autant la defense d'un humanisme belant, car Dufrenne entend temoigner de l'appartenance de l'homme a la Nature. Il propose, selon ses propres termes, "les elements d'une philosophie qui joigne au souci de l'etre le souci de l'homme". (shrink)

Philosophy as well as anthropology is a discipline concerned with what it means to be human, and hence with investigating the multiple ways of making sense of human life. An important task in this process is to remain open to diverse conceptions of human beings, not least conceptions that may on the face of it appear to be morally alien. A case in point are conceptions that are bound up with cannibalism, a practice sometimes assumed to be so morally scandalous (...) that it probably never happens, at least in a culturally sanctioned form. Questioning this assumption, along with Cora Diamond's contention that the very concept of a human being involves a prohibition against consuming human flesh, the present article explores how cannibalism can have an intelligible place in a human society – exemplified by the Wari’ of western Brazil. By coming to see this, we are enabled to enlarge our conception of the heterogeneity of possible ways of being human. (shrink)

La sustracción es una categoría fundamental en la filosofía de Alain Badiou para pensar tanto el ser como los procedimientos de verdad. Sobre ella se sostiene un concepto de “verdad” postfundacional que elude el esencialismo y se muestra irreductible a las teorías de la coherencia, la correspondencia y la confirmación. Este artículo indaga sobre el papel que la categoría de “sustracción” juega y las formas que adopta en la obra de Alain Badiou, específicamente en lo que a la construcción de (...) los procedimientos de verdad se refiere. El objetivo consiste en sacar a la luz las transformaciones que ha experimentado y los fundamentos racionales y especulativos que la sostienen en cada una de sus variaciones. En concreto, se identifican cuatro variaciones, que se correlacionan con los periodos que marcan la atmósfera conceptual de cada una de las opera magna filosóficas de Badiou (Théorie du sujet, L’être et l’événement, Logiques du mondes y L’immanence des vérités). Se concluye que la sustracción que despliega los procedimientos de verdad se caracteriza por establecer una relación dialéctica triádica con la afirmación y la negación, pero cuyo equilibrio es dinámico, con una idiosincrasia propia en cada una de esas variaciones. (shrink)

Does it make sense to think of eternal life not as an unending continuation of life subsequent to death but as fully actualized in one’s present mortal and finite life? After outlining conceptual and moral reasons for being troubled by the notion of an endless life, this article draws upon the thought of major Christian theologians and philosophers of religion to expound the idea of eternal life as a possession exclusively of the life one is presently living. Supplementing the claims (...) of religious thinkers with notions of four-dimensionalism and eternalism from theoretical physics and the philosophy of time, and considering important objections to the conception of eternal life in question, I argue for both the conception’s intelligibility and its ethical and spiritual profundity. (shrink)

The recent article “The Prospects of Artificial Consciousness: Ethical Dimensions and Concerns” by Elisabeth Hildt (2023) in the AJOB Neuroscience presents a thorough examination of the ethical imp...

Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in narrative both in certain areas of philosophy and in the study of religion. The philosophy of religion has not itself been at the forefront of this narrative turn, but exceptions exist—most notably Eleonore Stump’s work on biblical stories and the problem of suffering. Characterizing Stump’s approach as an apologetic orientation, this article contrasts it with pluralistic orientations that, rather than seeking to defend religious faith, are concerned with doing conceptual justice to the (...) range of possible human perspectives, both religious and nonreligious. By discussing various examples, the article makes a case for narrative philosophy of religion, especially in its pluralistic form. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCalls to prioritize practice in the study of religion typically claim that attention to lived practices rather than merely to ‘belief’ is needed if a given religious tradition or instance of religiosity is to be understood. Within that broad ambit, certain empirical researchers, as well as some Wittgenstein-influenced philosophers of religion, investigate the diversity of religious practices without passing judgement, whereas certain other philosophers foreground a narrower selection of examples while deploying moral criteria to distinguish acceptable from unacceptable religion. Characterizing (...) this methodological divergence in terms of descriptive versus normative orientations, the present article argues that while attention to practice is indeed vital, the imposition of normative evaluation is liable to inhibit an appreciation of the radical plurality of religious phenomena. (shrink)

Should publishing decisions be influenced by the potential for violent reactions?

How should a philosophical inquiry into the moral status of (nonhuman) animals proceed? Many philosophers maintain that by examining the “morally relevant” psychological or physiological capacities possessed by the members of different species, and comparing them with similar capacities possessed by human beings, the moral status of the animals in question can be established. Others contend that such an approach runs into serious moral and conceptual problems, a crucial one being that of how to give a coherent account of the (...) natural sense of concern for profoundly cognitively impaired human beings if moral status is assumed to depend on features that centrally include cognitive capacities. The present article discusses this debate with reference to Wittgenstein-influenced philosophers whose respective approaches, on the face of it, diverge dramatically. With a primary focus on Hans-Johann Glock and Cora Diamond, and a secondary focus on recent work by Alice Crary, I argue that, despite an overt disavowal of the kind of approach favoured by Diamond and Crary, Glock’s affirmation that we simply do “value human life” brings him closer to that approach than he acknowledges. (shrink)

This paper responds to Severin Schroeder's recent charge that Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion contains an ‘unresolved tension’ between three propositions, namely: (1) ‘As a hypothesis, God's existence (&c) is extremely implausible’; (2) ‘Christian faith is not unreasonable’; and (3) ‘Christian faith does involve belief in God's existence (&c)’. I argue as follows: that the first of these propositions has no place in Wittgenstein's thinking on religion; that the second is ill-phrased and should be re-worded as the proposition that ‘Christian faith (...) is neither unreasonable nor reasonable’; and that the third proposition (contrary to what Schroeder seems to assume) tells us nothing about the nature of the objects of religious belief. It follows from my argument that Schroeder has not exposed a tension in Wittgenstein's thoughts on religion. I end with some positive remarks about Wittgenstein's method. (shrink)

The study we report in this article addresses the results of comparing the rhetorical trees from two different languages carried out by two annotators starting from the Rhetorical Structure Theory. Furthermore, we investigate the methodology for a suitable evaluation, both quantitative and qualitative, of these trees. Our corpus contains abstracts of medical research articles written both in Spanish and Basque, and extracted from Gaceta Médica de Bilbao. The results demonstrate that almost half of the annotator disagreement is due to the (...) use of translation strategies that notably affect rhetorical structures. (shrink)

Parue en 1953, la Phénoménologie de l'expérience esthétique applique pour la première fois à l'esthétique l'appareil conceptuel de la phénoménologie. Elle élabore une analyse de l'oeuvre d'art et, plus largement, de l'objet esthétique, si divers et changeants qu'en soient les traits singuliers. Elle s'attache à décrire l'expérience esthétique vécue, ce moyen privilégié que nous avons d'éprouver notre présence au sensible. Elle célèbre cette forme heureuse du sentir, ce haut moment de la perception où se révèle, à la limite du pensable, (...) la connivence originaire de l'homme et du monde. (shrink)

Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning. The belief in karma and rebirth, according to which actions performed in one lifetime bear fruit in a subsequent one, is widespread, some version of it being common among Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and some other religious traditions. Ethnographic studies sometimes provide examples of how this belief manifests in people’s lives. For instance, fieldwork carried out by Richard and Candy Shweder in the eastern Indian town of Bhubaneswar yielded (...) interview footage exhibiting how members of the Hindu community apply the concepts of karma and rebirth in describing their situations. A poignant case is that of an eighty-three-year-old high-caste .. (shrink)

the aim of this paper is to prove that secession is inherently undemocratic. We will review the secessionist arguments: the one that starts from a wrong idea of selfgovernment and the one that starts from liberalism. then, we will oppose objections to both: defending the value of equality; rejecting internal homogeneity claims; picking up Buchanan’s classic objections; and finally, reformulating, with Habermas and Pogge, a concept of self-government in order to deduce that it is not legitimate to draw more boundaries (...) because an ideal democracy would require to eliminate the current borders. (shrink)

The doctrine of karma has been praised as a rational and morally edifying explanatory response to the existence of evil and apparent injustice in the world. Critics have attacked it as a morally misguided dogma that distorts one's vision of reality. This essay, after outlining the traditional doctrine, examines three criticisms that have been central to recent debates: firstly, that the doctrine offers no practical guidance; second, that it faces a dilemma between free will and fatalism; and third, that it (...) involves a morally repugnant form of blaming victims for their own misfortunes. Possible responses are considered, the depth of the disagreement is highlighted, and a morally significant difference between alternative ways of articulating the belief in karma is analyzed. (shrink)

The Dempster–Shafer approach to expressing beliefabout a parameter in a statistical model is notconsistent with the likelihood principle. Thisinconsistency has been recognized for some time, andmanifests itself as a non-commutativity, in which theorder of operations (combining belief, combininglikelihood) makes a difference. It is proposed herethat requiring the expression of belief to be committed to the model (and to certain of itssubmodels) makes likelihood inference very nearly aspecial case of the Dempster–Shafer theory.