Religion is often criticized for failing to uphold animal concerns, yet Zoroastrianism, an ancient religion that underlies the Abrahamic traditions as well as Eastern religions, offers some strikingly contemporary concerns regarding the kinship of human and nonhuman animals. Human and nonhuman animals alike have souls, free will, and life after death. In the middle of the second millennium BCE, Zoroaster called attention to the treatment of animals as necessary to the divine order and righteousness that has been disturbed by evil (...) and sin. How humans treat animals also affects their own well-being in this world and the next. (shrink)

Abstract2 Enoch 58–59 provides an esoteric and somewhat eccentric delineation of attitudes toward the mistreatment of animals within some sect of Egyptian Judaism, in all probability. Three attitudes, having to do with the mistreatment of animals in failing to feed them properly, the wrongful binding of animals for sacrifice, and possible secret sexual exploitation of animals, are delineated along with warnings regarding the effects of such treatment on the human soul at the great judgment. This linking of how humans treat (...) animals with how humans will be judged in “the great age” is unique in the literature of this period and demonstrates a deep concern for animal welfare that has been largely dormant in many facets of religion until more recent times. (shrink)

The various efforts to put the idea of humanity on a secure ethical, political, and social base have not succeeded. The various post-humanist and transhumanist programs are inadequate. Our deep-seated suspicion of our deepest selves and motives is understandable in light of the barbarity of the twentieth century, but humanism is not to blame. The thought of Ernst Cassirer holds a framework for a new humanism, once it is rid of certain colonialist, triumphalist, and Eurocentric ideas that distorted Cassirer’s understanding (...) of the European role in creating the problems of civilization, especially its mistake of thinking that science was a progressive symbolic form of culture. I set out the basis of a new humanism based upon not the problem of knowledge, but the problem of genuine self-situating socialty, a personalist point of view. (shrink)

This paper aims to consider Peirce and Eco’s approach to signs and semiotics in order to assess their relation to Peirce’s mature pragmatism. Both thinkers attempted to set out a truly general theory of signs, and ran into difficulties on similar points. I show that the responses of Peirce and Eco to the difficulties that arose in seeking a truly general theory of signs were quite different. And yet, the differences are not so deep as to prevent us from thinking (...) of both Peirce and Eco as pragmatists, and perhaps of a similar stripe. (shrink)

Preview: Bergson noted that the cinematographic image does not really move. It is, then as now, a series of still photographs. The real motion in such images is produced by machinery, which imparts a kinesis, an energy of movement, to the succession of fixed images. Our perception then endows such images with their “life,” insofar as they can be said to possess life. It is an illusion, it is “virtual” both as space and time. The real duration, as generated by (...) the machinery or as lived by the perceiver is part of a broader system of images that includes those still photographs and their succession. Images of images of images, by the time they are processed by our bodies and appear to our mind’s eye as inhibited acts we have not enacted. (shrink)

Eco says that which cannot be theorized must be narrated. What about that which cannot be narrated? What must we do about the limits of interpretation, especially as narration. This review essay takes a method from Giambattista Vico and applies it to the interpretation of Laurent Binet’s portrayal of Umberto Eco in his novel The Seventh Function of Language. Comparing the character of Eco with the thought of the historical Eco we find coincidences and other angles at incidence that reveal (...) some portion of Binet’s underlying interpretation of Eco, and it limits. (shrink)

Philosophers analyze the last of the great rock stars.

This volume consists of an intellectual autobiography by world-renowned philosopher Hilary Putnam, 26 critical or descriptive essays, 26 replies by Arthur C. Danto, and a bibliography listing all of Putnam's published writings.

In 1922 Charles Hartshorne, then an aspiring young philosopher, wrote to Edgar Sheffield Brightman, a preeminent philosopher of religion for twenty-three subsequent years and, remarkably, almost every letter was preserved. In their introductory essays, editors Randall Auxier and Mark Davies place the unusually rich and intensive correspondence in its intellectual context and address the relationship between personalism and process philosophy/theology in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy.

Global security cannot be achieved until people view the world as a global community. Until such time, differences will continue to be perceived as threatening. These perceived “threats” are the primary threat to global security. This volume proposes methods for minimizing the “us versus them” mentality so that we can build a sense of global community.

BOOK REVIEWS 3~3 reaction to them into account. The actual historical dialectic involving Moore, Mal- colm, and Wittgenstein is a good deal more complicated, and more interesting, than the story told here by Stroll. Moving on to Stroll's discussion of Wittgenstein, I should now acknowledge that, so far as I can judge, Stroll offers a largely reliable account of On Certainty. In particular, in the best chapter of the book, on "Wittgenstein's Foundationalism," he makes a convincing case for the view (...) that Wittgenstein, unlike Moore, separates propositional knowledge from the kind of "non-propositional" certainty concerning what "stands fast" for us and which is primarily evinced in our ways of acting. What is less clear to me is just what kind of response to sceptical arguments this amounts to: Stroll says that although at some points Wittgenstein is prepared to countenance, in a relativist spirit which closely adjoins scepticism, radical changes in what is thus cer- tain, by and large towards the end of On Certainty Wittgenstein advances an "absolut- ist" position which rules out such changes. But if this is so , we surely need some arguments why it has to be so. But much here depends on the broader context within which Wittgenstein's position is developed and discussed. Despite noting Wittgenstein's invocation of the conception of man as a "primitive.. (shrink)

"Essays explore philosophical themes in the Wizard of Oz saga, comprising the books by L. Frank Baum, the 1939 film, the novel Wicked, and related films and ...

_The Quantum of Explanation_ advances a bold new theory of how explanation ought to be understood in philosophical and cosmological inquiries. Using a complete interpretation of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical and mathematical writings and an interpretive structure that is essentially new, Auxier and Herstein argue that Whitehead has never been properly understood, nor has the depth and breadth of his contribution to the human search for knowledge been assimilated by his successors. This important book effectively applies Whitehead’s philosophy to problems (...) in the interpretation of science, empirical knowledge, and nature. It develops a new account of philosophical naturalism that will contribute to the current naturalism debate in both Analytic and Continental philosophy. Auxier and Herstein also draw attention to some of the most important differences between the process theology tradition and Whitehead’s thought, arguing in favor of a Whiteheadian naturalism that is more or less independent of theological concerns. This book offers a clear and comprehensive introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy and is an essential resource for students and scholars interested in American philosophy, the philosophy of mathematics and physics, and issues associated with naturalism, explanation and radical empiricism. (shrink)

In the first of two essays on the ontological ground of otherness, and its phenomenological availability, we argue that what we call the “occasion” within the encounter of others are sources as well as re-sources for disclosing the results of a construction and concealment of a secret identity, one we keep from ourselves even though we have created it. Yet, individuals are capable of returning their encounters to the well of sensus communis, and that sensus communis is as natural as (...) it is cultural. Human beings are not compelled to interpret strangeness as threat, even if we are culturally compelled to interpret strangeness itself. Narrative lives in our sensus communis, and it is open, revisable, even danceable. Immediacy is person, the person that is community, and it is sublime, is both liked and disliked. (shrink)

Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the New York Review of Books, Danto also has become one of the most respected public intellectuals of his generation. He is the author of some two dozen important books, along with hundreds of articles and reviews (...) which have been the center of both controversy and discussion. In this volume Danto offers his intellectual autobiography and responds to essays by 27 of the keenest critics of his thought from the worlds of philosophy and the arts. The book includes 16 pages of color art reproductions. Danto is the author dozens of books on art, philosophy, the philosophy of art, and art criticism. He is a rare philosopher who is also a public intellectual. (shrink)

Usually philosophers worry about the existence of mind, or consciousness, or persons, or other difficult-to-explain phenomena. Having posited matter or nature, or fields, they wonder where can person or consciousness originate? This kind of thinking is backward. Only persons ask such questions. Persons exist. I turn the tables on the traditional problem of person by asking whether anything impersonal really exists. I argue that the impersonal almost exists, using the theory of feeling of Max Scheler and supplementing it with insights (...) from Alfred North Whitehead and Josiah Royce. Even though feeling almost succeeds in divesting itself of the pre-supposed act of the person, but its concrete actuality blocks such complete self-abstraction. (shrink)

George Holmes Howison’s 1895 essay entitled “The Limits of Evolution,” argued that there are four things evolutionary theory does not explain. In examining whether 11 decades have made a difference in these four, I argue that the arrogance of scientists over the past century in refusing to distinguish between full explanations and explanatory hypotheses is in some ways responsible for the fundamentalist backlash against evolutionary science. A scientific community that is honest and forthcoming about its limitations is to be sought. (...) The best response to Intelligent Design, Creation Science, and other current trends in pseudoscience is to be very clear about the limits of evolutionary theory and the scope of scientific explanation. (shrink)

The edited collection Rorty and Beyond assesses and moves beyond Rorty’s legacy, bringing together leading international philosophers. The collection covers diverse territory, from his views about what we may hope for to his personal character, and everything in between.

A clear understanding of social justice requires complex rather than simple answers. It requires comfort with ambiguity rather than absolute answers. This is counter to viewing right versus wrong, just vs. unjust, or good vs. evil as dichotomies. This book provides many examples of where and how to begin to view these as continuums rather than dichotomies.