This book is a historically informed and textually grounded study of the connections between Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, and Nietzsche, who thought of himself as an "attempter." In conversation with the Essais, Nietzsche developed key themes of his oeuvre: experimental scepticism, gay science, the quest for drives beneath consciousness, the free spirit, the affirmation of sexuality and the body, and the meaning of greatness. Robert Miner explores these connections in the context of Nietzsche's reverence for Montaigne-a reverence he (...) held for no other author-and asks what Montaigne would make of Nietzsche. The question arises from Nietzsche himself, who both celebrates Montaigne and includes him among a small number of authors to whose judgment he is prepared to submit.. (shrink)

The concept of truth is at the core of science, journalism, law, and many other pillars of modern society. Yet, given the imprecision of natural language, deciding what information should count as true is no easy task, even with access to the ground truth. How do people decide whether a given claim of fact qualifies as true or false? Across two studies (N = 1181; 16,248 observations), participants saw claims of fact alongside the ground truth about those claims. Participants classified (...) each claim as true or false. Although participants knew precisely how accurate the claims were, participants classified claims as false more often when they judged the information source to be intending to deceive (versus inform) their audience, and classified claims as true more often when they judged the information source to be intending to provide an approximate (versus precise) account. These results suggest that, even if people have access to the same set of facts, they might disagree about the truth of claims if they attribute discrepant intentions to information sources. Such findings may shed light on the robust and persistent disagreements over claims of fact that have arisen in the “post-truth era”. (shrink)

Genomics holds significant potential for conservationists, offering tools to monitor species risks, enhance conservation strategies, envision biodiverse futures, and advance climate justice. However, integrating genomics into conservation requires careful consideration of its impacts on biodiversity, the diversity of scientific researchers, and governance strategies for data usage. These factors must be balanced with the varied interests of affected communities and environmental concerns. We argue that conservationists should engage with diverse communities, particularly those historically marginalized and most vulnerable to climate change. This (...) inclusive approach can ensure that genomic technologies are applied ethically and effectively, aligning conservation efforts with broader social and environmental justice goals. Engaging diverse stakeholders will help guide responsible genomic integration, fostering equitable and sustainable conservation outcomes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Verum-factum and Practical Wisdom in the Early Writings of Giambattista VicoRobert C. MinerAs several contemporary writers have noted, Giambattista Vico defends the idea of practical knowledge, a type of knowledge that cannot be fully expressed by propositions and defies reductions to method. 1 The defense of practical knowledge, against Descartes and the rise of objectifying science, is most clearly articulated in a group of Vico’s early writings: the oration (...) De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709), the metaphysical book De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710), and two rejoinders (Prima and Seconda risposte) to critics of the De antiquissima. In these texts Vico criticizes Cartesian method in terms that remind us of Aristotle, or at least the Aristotle of the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. “If you were to import the geometrical method into practical life, you would do no more than exhaust yourself in becoming a rational lunatic” (A 7.5). 2This comment and many others like it seem to suggest that Vico is an “Aristotelian,” but any simple classification is problematic. In the same text in which Vico defends the Aristotelian topos he also announces that “the true and the made are convertible” (verum et factum convertuntur). The emphasis on the [End Page 53] role of “making” in truth seems incompatible with the Aristotelian idea of phronesis, whose knowledge is associated with praxis and cannot be reduced to techne. It would be simpler if Vico distinguished between a realm in which the verum-factum principle applied and one in which prudentia was supreme. However, Vico not only situates mathematics and experimental science within the metaphysical framework governed by verum-factum, but also implies strong connections between making and ethics. The prominence Vico assigns to making in all areas of human endeavor gives him a distinctly modern appearance in the fashion of Bacon, Galileo, and Hobbes.This gives rise to both hermeneutical and philosophical problems. Is Vico simply hesitating between the old and new? Does he coherently balance an Aristotelian perspective with the “modern” emphasis on artifice? 3 Perhaps Vico is caught in the middle of the querelle des anciens et modernes, somewhat like John Dunn’s version of Locke, a “tragic figure” who cannot reconcile his epistemological discoveries with a noninstrumentalist view of practical reason. 4 The purpose of this essay is to provide a sympathetic interpretation of Vico’s early writings on prudentia and its links to both verum-factum and rhetoric.Vico contra Rule-based EthicsThe denial that ethics is well understood as a matter of following or justifying general rules has become a commonplace among contemporary Aris-totelians and Wittgensteinians. 5 Against the Enlightenment ambition to construct a universally valid moral science, recent virtue ethics has emphasized the irreducibly contingent aspects of human life, aspects which resist the clutches of “method.” Although Descartes wrote little about morals directly, his influence can be detected in the ethical writings of Hobbes, Kant, Mill, and Sidgwick. These examples of modern moral philosophy presuppose the correctness of the Cartesian diagnosis of ancient and medieval writing on virtue. In the Discourse on Method Descartes compares previous moral teaching to “the most proud and magnificent palaces built on nothing but sand or mud.” 6 Descartes himself did not provide a rational justification of ethics, but he has had no shortage of successors who have tried to complete his foundational project. Jusnaturalism, Kantian deontology, and utilitarianism, as different as they are from one another, share the desire to ground ethics in principles as universal and certain as [End Page 54] those of mathematics. Each of these variants of post-Cartesian ethics claim to have discovered and justified such a principle or set of principles. Maxims deduced from the principle, if not the principle itself, will arguably enable moral agents to discover the right course of action in a particular situation.Vico did not live to witness the most articulate expressions of a Cartesian approach to ethics, but he did apprehend the shift in focus from prudence to method. In the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, an oration delivered at the University of Naples in 1708 and published the following year, Vico criticizes approaches that locate... (shrink)

Mainstream breast cancer social movements such as that of Susan G. Komen have called on all women to race or fight for the cure for breast cancer. They suggest that the fight can be won by buying and wearing pink ribbons, taking part in races and walks, donating money, and participating in research. For some patients with breast cancer, research participation may involve non-diagnostic tumor biopsies. While this clinical research is performed in the hope of gaining new knowledge through the (...) removal and study of breast cancer tissue, these procedures have been heavily criticized because they offer little potential benefit to the patient providing the tissue (Helft and Daugherty 2006; Kimmelman et al. 2012;... (shrink)

We are much given to supposing that "knowledge" designates a few prize classes of—of what I am not sure, but matters quite distinct from, superior to, others. It seems we are beginning to understand that: "Such terms as sensation, perception, imagery, recall, problem-solving, and thinking, among many others, refer to hypothetical stages or aspects of cognition."1 The imagery of Macbeth refers to a hypothetical stage or aspect of cognition, as does problem solving using algebra. For that matter, it might be (...) argued that "cognition" itself is hypothetical, only a part of knowing, only an abstraction of a human activity. But we must have terms to make sense, and we can take "cognition" to designate the activity that we otherwise designate in specific result as knowledge. In such a view, what we know is all "a human being might possibly do." That "all" is inexplicable apart from doer-knower, from a postulated "real world," and from activities by organs or tissue collectively referred to as the brain. · 1. Ulrich Neisser, Cognitive Psychology , p. 3. Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His works include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the Present and Japanese Linked Poetry. He has contributed "On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems, Part 1" and "On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems, Part 2" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The Summa Theologiae is Thomas Aquinas' undisputed masterwork, and it includes his thoughts on the elemental forces in human life. Feelings such as love, hatred, pleasure, pain, hope and despair were described by Aquinas as 'passions', representing the different ways in which happiness could be affected. But what causes the passions? What impact do they have on the person who suffers them? Can they be shaped and reshaped in order to better promote human flourishing? The aim of this book is (...) to provide a better understanding of Aquinas' account of the passions. It identifies the Aristotelian influences that lie at the heart of the Summa Theologiae, and it enters into a dialogue with contemporary thinking about the nature of emotion. The study argues that Aquinas' work is still important today, and shows why for Aquinas both the understanding and attainment of happiness requires prolonged reflection on the passions. (shrink)

Background: In 2014, companies began covering the costs of egg freezing for their employees. The adoption of this benefit was highly contentious. Some argued that it offered women more reproductive...

A fresh translation of _quaestiones_ from the _Summa theologiae _of Thomas Aquinas, edited by Robert Miner. This volume provides direct access to the medieval theologian’s deepest thinking about the supreme goal of human life—blessedness—and the virtue most intimately related to this goal—charity. The edition also contains Aquinas’s treatment of charity’s effects—love, joy, peace, and mercy—and the vices opposed to them, such as hatred, envy, and war. Featuring five supplementary essays by noted Aquinas scholars, the volume will enable readers to engage (...) more thoroughly with the thought of Thomas Aquinas. (shrink)

The article proposes Logic of Secrets in Collaboration Networks, a formal logical system for reasoning about a set of secrets established over a fixed configuration of communication channels. The system’s key feature, a multi-channel relation called independence, is a generalization of a two-channel relation known in the literature as nondeducibility. The main result is the completeness of the proposed system with respect to a semantics of secrets.

Truth in the Making represents a sophisticated effort to map the complex relations between human knowledge and creative power, as reflected across more than half a millennium of philosophical enquiry. Showing the intimacy of this problematic to the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Vico and David Lachterman, the book reveals how questions about creation apparently diluted by secularism in fact retain much of their potency today. If science could counterfeit or synthesize nature precisely from its (...) smallest nuts and bolts, as Descartes and Hobbes implied and as modern science increasingly suggests, would it create an identical world to that we live in now Robert C. Miner offers a precise genealogy of modern thought on truth and creation: from medieval theology's identification of human creativity with divine initiative to the radical Leibnizian contention that human ideas are 'not little copies of God's', and may at once exceed mimesis and produce things new, unpredictable and unseen. He considers how the theological importance given to creation interacts historically with the secularisation and instrumentalisation of modes of discovery and method, and asks how knowledge is understood between different disciplines, from the allegorical discipline of poetry to the constructible field of mathematics. The book is an eloquent reminder of the ways in which theology continues to fling a wild card at philosophical understandings of reality, countering theories of metaphysical equivalence of the 'real' and 'artificial' with theologies in which human making is always fallible, and strives only for approximate participation in divine truth. As a strenuous and informative breakdown of leading theories of knowledge, Truth in the Making shows the continuing influence of theological questions upon philosophical, scientific and aesthetic disciplines, whilst raising topical questions about the ultimate nature of our reality and our freedom to modify and define it. (shrink)

In the Questions on charity in the ST (2a2ae, qq. 23-46), Aquinas considers at length the vices opposed to charity, omitting altogether any Question on a vice opposed to mercy. What does the omission reveal about mercy and its difficulties? First, I reject ready-to-hand explanations of the omission. Second, I consider the relation between mercy and compassion, showing that for Thomas the primary impediments to compassion are less vices than psychological forces irreducible to any single vice. Third, I turn to (...) a different set of obstacles to mercy – acts that can arise from compassion, but do not help (and often harm) the person in need. Given these difficulties, how can Thomas take the practice of virtuous mercy to be generally possible? I conclude with a discussion of suffering and the gift of wisdom. (shrink)

A guide to Nietzsche's most personal book.

ExcerptAfter emigrating to the United States, Leo Strauss taught political philosophy for thirty years, first at the New School for Social Research in New York and then at the University of Chicago, before retiring at St. John's College. Richard Wolin observes that he “seems to have deeply mistrusted day-to-day politics—a very strange stance, to be sure, for someone who made his living teaching political philosophy.”1 But is it really so strange? What in his German Gymnasium education, or his participation in (...) the Zionist movement, would have prepared him for the peculiarities of day-to-day American politics? Strauss did not underestimate the…. (shrink)

All we know of this law is to be found in Cicero's Pro Cluentio. Elsewhere we have only one passing reference to it. However, this speech seems to give us the main clause of the bill as it appeared after incorporation in the Lex Cornelia de sicariis el veneficis: ‘Qui tribunus militum legionibus quattuor primis quive quaestor, tribunus plebis’ —deinceps omnes magistratus nominavit—‘quive in senatu sententiam dixit dixerit, qui eorum coiit, coierit, convenit, convenerit quo quis iudicio publico condemnaretur de eius (...) capite quaerito. (shrink)

By a "literary system" we must mean two distinct yet related matters: a discrete and continuous literary history of "occurrences" such as that we designate as English literature; and a continuous set of ideas about what that first system is. To be sure, the first consists in our thought of it, which is to say of literary creations in temporal series. But the literary creations themselves represent a development or, at a minimum, a sequence of examples of literary knowledge or (...) what may be generally termed poems. That temporally serial set of creations of knowledge had individual knowers in its creators, its poets. Our historical knowledge of the poems consists of ideas about their serial, differentiated character, about their relation to each other, and about their relationship to their creators and the times in which they were created. The second sense of a literary system involves what we call criticism, knowledge about that knowledge is synchronic, as we consider such things as epics, tragedies, lyrics, or novels as categories possessing some validity. But this second kind of literary system has also an historical, diachronic character by virtue of the fact that there were generations before which the novel did not exist or generations during which the novel evolved as a kind of literature whose possibilities were exploited and altered. Without the novel in its history, there can be no history of criticism about the novel. These two varieties of literary system can be designated, then, as literary systems proper and as critical systems. The second does require the existence of the first, in spite of seeming exceptions. We might imagine a new nation wishing to have a literature it does not presently possess. The literature envisioned would imply a poetics prior to the emergent literary system, but the poetics would be borrowed from another literature in which the literary system had predated its critical system. Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. "That Literature is a Kind of Knowledge," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Spring 1976 issue. His works include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the Present and Japanese Linked Poetry. Part II of the present essay appeared in the Spring 1979 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The account in Part I of this essay posited two related but distinct sequences of development: of literary systems proper and of critical systems. Or, more simply, we must recognize that literary practices and systematic ideas about them develop in different ways. Today we can see in retrospect that lyric, narrative, and lyric-narrative or narrative-lyric begin literary cultures. Systematic ideas about literature develop, however, more by accident, what seems to be the result of conditions producing important critical minds at times (...) propitious for reflection. Any full account would have to consider such things as bipropertied conceptions. This has been mentioned before, but a specific example can be given here. Chinese wen designated not merely poetry but also prose historical writing: the fu established a kind of middle ground between them. In any event, such combinations, such bipropertied conceptions, do exist in very sophisticated times. Another matter of crucial importance involves the difference between the actual or descriptive existence of a literary variety and normative or valued critical consideration of a given kind. Various evidence shows that ancient Greece had lyrics as well as narrative, and preliterary Japan, narrative as well as lyrics. In the case of Greece, we tend today to think of narrative normatively as the early literature, although Plato and Aristotle lumped it with lyric and concerned themselves almost entirely with their crucial genre, drama. As for early Japan, the narrative was largely a possession of reciters, and so few heroic cycles are left from the nondominant peoples that narrative poetry is more a supposition that a presence. But there is in what remains from early times a mixture of lyric poetry with narrative prose. That combination did not prove crucial for a systematic poetics, although it is of utmost significance for later developments. It can hardly be said emphatically enough that the literary system comes first and the critical system after some interval. But the various complexities in different cultures are such that to get our bearings we may well consider the course of literary development in a single culture. Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. "That Literature is a Kind of Knowledge," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Spring 1976 issue. His works include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the Present and Japanese Linked Poetry. Part I of the present essay appeared in the Winter 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

We describe an approach that enables a more complete evaluation of the validity of emotional intelligence measures. We argue that a source of evidence for validity is often overlooked by researchers and test developers, namely, evidence based on response processes. This evidence can be obtained through a definition of the ability, a description of the mental processes that operate when a person uses the ability, the development of a theory of response behaviour that links variation in the construct with variation (...) on the responses to the items of a measure, and a test of the theory of response behaviour through one or more strategies that we describe. (shrink)

Imre Lakatos' "methodology of scientific research programs" and Alasdair MacIntyre's "tradition-constituted enquiry" are two sustained attempts to overcome the assumptions of logical empiricism, while saving the appearance that theory-change is rational. The key difference between them is their antithetical stand on the issue of incommensurability between large-scale theories. This divergence generates other areas of disagreement; the most important are the relevance of the historical record and the presence of decision criteria that are common to rival programs. I show that Lakatos' (...) rejection of the incommensurability thesis and dismissal of actual history are motivated by the belief that neither are compatible with the rationality of theory-change. If MacIntyre can deny the necessity of dispensing with the historical record, and show that incommensurability and the consequent absence of shared decision criteria are compatible with rationality in theory-change, then Lakatos' argument will lose its force, and MacIntyre will better honor the intention to take seriously the historicality of science. I argue that MacIntyre can dissolve tensions between incommensurability and rationality in theory-change if he is able, first, to distinguish a sense of the incommensurability thesis that preserves genuine rivalry between theories, and second, to show that the possibility of rationality in theory-change depends not on the presence of common decision criteria, but on the fact that traditions can fail by their own standards. After reconstructing and examining the argument, I conclude that the notion of a tradition's "internal failure" is coherent, but that it leaves crucial questions about the epistemology and ontology of traditions that must be answered if MacIntyre's proposal is to constitute a genuine improvement on Lakatos. (shrink)

Volume 27, Issue 5, September 2019, Page 1066-1068.

We can describe certain actions as defective in a particular virtue, for example, as “unjust” or “intemperate.” We can take the additional step of describing such actions as “morally wrong” or “contrary to moral obligation.” A key claim of Elizabeth Anscombe's “Modern Moral Philosophy” is that if we choose to describe virtue-defective actions as “morally wrong,” because we are “obliged” or “bound” or “required” not to do them, we are in fact taking an additional step and that this step stands (...) in need of explanation. Just what, if anything, is added to the description of an action as “unjust” when we say there is an obligation not to do it? Anscombe thinks “the answer is in history: between Aristotle and us came Christianity, with its law conception of ethics.” 1 In this paper, I shall confront this question in two parts. First, I will consider the possibility, argued for by Simon Blackburn, that Anscombe's historical explanation cannot answer this question because her history is based on the false premise that the Greeks do not possess the “moral ought.” Describing an action as contrary to obligation may still add something to “unjust,” but historical genealogy of Anscombe's sort will not shed any light on the question. Since I think that Blackburn's arguments, although important, are not conclusive, I will proceed to consider the implications of Anscombe's own view of what talk about obligation adds to descriptions of actions as defective in virtue. This will require elaboration of her cryptic Wittgensteinian remark that “it really does add something to the description ‘unjust’ to say there is an obligation not to do it; for what obliges is the divine law—as rules oblige in a game.” 2. (shrink)

Abstract Struck by essentialist and anti-essentialist elements in his writings, Nietzsche's readers have wondered whether his conception of the self is incoherent or paradoxical. This paper demonstrates that his conception of the self, while complex, is not paradoxical or incoherent, but contains four distinct levels. Section I shows Schopenhauer as Educator to contain an early description of the four levels: (1) a person's deepest self, embracing all that cannot be educated or molded; (2) a person's ego; (3) a person's ?ideal? (...) or ?higher self?; (4) a person's ?true self? or ?true nature?. In the remaining three sections, I show that Nietzsche develops and enriches this conception, without ever abandoning it. Section II treats the fourfold conception as it appears in Human, All Too Human. Section III interrogates relevant passages in the Gay Science, showing that while Nietzsche speaks of artful self-fashioning (as Alexander Nehamas emphasizes), he also pays due regard to the sense in which we are not our own creations. Section IV turns to the ?deepest? level of the self, consisting of motives and drives. Drawing primarily upon Daybreak and Beyond Good and Evil, I show that Nietzsche regards neither the drives nor their hierarchical ordering as things that we construct. (shrink)