In 1826 Americans witnessed the spectacle of President John Quincy Adams and Vice-President John C. Calhoun taking to the press to debate the nature of power and liberty under the pseudonyms "Patrick Henry" and "Onslow". In the course of this exchange some of the most salient issues within American politics and liberty are debated, including the nature of political order, democracy, and the diffusion of political power.

An analysis of two heuristic strategies for the development of mechanistic models, illustrated with historical examples from the life sciences. In Discovering Complexity, William Bechtel and Robert Richardson examine two heuristics that guided the development of mechanistic models in the life sciences: decomposition and localization. Drawing on historical cases from disciplines including cell biology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics, they identify a number of "choice points" that life scientists confront in developing mechanistic explanations and show how different choices result in (...) divergent explanatory models. Describing decomposition as the attempt to differentiate functional and structural components of a system and localization as the assignment of responsibility for specific functions to specific structures, Bechtel and Richardson examine the usefulness of these heuristics as well as their fallibility—the sometimes false assumption underlying them that nature is significantly decomposable and hierarchically organized. When Discovering Complexity was originally published in 1993, few philosophers of science perceived the centrality of seeking mechanisms to explain phenomena in biology, relying instead on the model of nomological explanation advanced by the logical positivists (a model Bechtel and Richardson found to be utterly inapplicable to the examples from the life sciences in their study). Since then, mechanism and mechanistic explanation have become widely discussed. In a substantive new introduction to this MIT Press edition of their book, Bechtel and Richardson examine both philosophical and scientific developments in research on mechanistic models since 1993. (shrink)

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing over two thousand years before Wall Street, called people who engaged in activities which did not contribute to society "parasites." In his latest work, renowned scholar Robert C. Solomon asserts that though capitalism may require capital, but it does not require, much less should it be defined by the parasites it inevitably attracts. Capitalism has succeeded not with brute strength or because it has made people rich, but because it has produced responsible citizens and--however (...) unevenly--prosperous communities. It cannot tolerate a conception of business that focuses solely on income and vulgarity while ignoring traditional virtues of responsibility, community, and integrity. Many feel that there is too much lip-service and not enough understanding of the importance of cooperation and integrity in corporate life. This book rejects the myths and metaphors of war-like competition that cloud business thinking and develops an "Aristotelean" theory of business. The author's approach emphasizes several core concepts: the corporation as community, the search for excellence, the importance of integrity and sound judgment, as well as a more cooperative and humane vision of business. Solomon stresses the virtues of honesty, trust, fairness, and compassion in the competitive business world, and confronts the problem of "moral mazes" and what he posits as its solution--moral courage. (shrink)

The _Nicomachean Ethics_ is one of Aristotle’s most widely read and influential works. Ideas central to ethics—that happiness is the end of human endeavor, that moral virtue is formed through action and habituation, and that good action requires prudence—found their most powerful proponent in the person medieval scholars simply called “the Philosopher.” Drawing on their intimate knowledge of Aristotle’s thought, Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins have produced here an English-language translation of the _Ethics_ that is as remarkably (...) faithful to the original as it is graceful in its rendering. Aristotle is well known for the precision with which he chooses his words, and in this elegant translation his work has found its ideal match. Bartlett and Collins provide copious notes and a glossary providing context and further explanation for students, as well as an introduction and a substantial interpretive essay that sketch central arguments of the work and the seminal place of Aristotle’s _Ethics_ in his political philosophy as a whole. The _Nicomachean Ethics_ has engaged the serious interest of readers across centuries and civilizations—of peoples ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—and this new edition will take its place as the standard English-language translation. (shrink)

Some sharing economy firms have adopted a strategy of “regulatory entrepreneurship,” openly violating regulations with the aim of rendering them dead letters. This article argues that in a democracy, regulatory entrepreneurship is a presumptively unethical business strategy. In all but the most corrupt political environments, businesses that seek to change their regulatory environment should do so through the democratic political process, and they should do so without using illegal business practices to build a political constituency. To show this, the article (...) defends a qualified moral obligation for businesspeople to obey the law even in societies that fall short of ideal democracy and that are rife with economic injustice. Owners and managers of successful businesses have strong moral reasons to obey laws concerning resource allocation. Such laws include not only property law, but also tax laws, environmental regulations, and other laws that regulate businesses in competitive markets. The moral reasons to obey such laws apply even to laws that business leaders think unfair or inefficient, provided that the laws in question have reasonable, good faith defenders. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore Fregean metatheory, what Frege called the New Science. The New Science arises in the context of Frege’s debate with Hilbert over independence proofs in geometry and we begin by considering their dispute. We propose that Frege’s critique rests on his view that language is a set of propositions, each immutably equipped with a truth value (as determined by the thought it expresses), so to Frege it was inconceivable that axioms could even be considered to be (...) other than true. Because of his adherence to this view, Frege was precluded from the sort of metatheoretical considerations that were available to Hilbert; but from this, we shall argue, it does not follow that Frege was blocked from metatheory in toto. Indeed, Frege suggests in Die Grundlagen der Geometrie a metatheoretical method for establishing independence proofs in the context of the New Science. Frege had reservations about the method, however, primarily because of the apparent need to stipulate the logical terms, those terms that must be held invariant to obtain such proofs. We argue that Frege’s skepticism on this score is not warranted, by showing that within the New Science a characterization of logical truth and logical constant can be obtained by a suitable adaptation of the permutation argument Frege employs in indicating how to prove independence. This establishes a foundation for Frege’s metatheoretical method of which he himself was unsure, and allows us to obtain a clearer understanding of Frege’s conception of logic, especially in relation to contemporary conceptions. (shrink)

In our society, some aspects of life are off-limits to commerce. We prohibit the selling of children and the buying of wives, juries, and kidneys. Tainted blood is an inevitable consequence of paying blood donors; even sophisticated laboratory tests cannot supplant the gift-giving relationship as a safeguard of the purity of blood. Like blood, health care is too precious, intimate, and corruptible to entrust to the market.The hospice movement in the United States is approximately 40 years old. During these past (...) four decades, the concept of holistic, multidisciplinary care for patients who are suffering from a terminal illness has evolved from a modest, grassroots constellation of primarily volunteer-run and community-governed endeavors to a multimillion dollar industry where the surviving nonprofits compete with for-profit providers, often publicly traded, managed by M.B.A.-trained executives, and governed by corporate boards. The relatively recent emergence of for-profit hospice reflects an increasing commercialization of health care in the United States, the potentially adverse impact of which has been well documented. (shrink)

This paper defends a new argument for enabling citizen participation in government: individuals must have genuine opportunities to try to change the law in order to be able to satisfy duties of conscience. Without such opportunities, citizens who regard systems of related laws as partially unjust face a moral dilemma. If they comply with these laws willingly without also trying to change them, they commit a pro tanto wrong by willingly participating in injustice . If they disobey, or if they (...) obey only to avoid sanction, they respond inadequately to the morally important purposes that the laws advance despite their injustice. Government should help citizens avoid this dilemma. This argument bolsters the non-instrumentalist view that responsiveness in the political process is desirable even if it does not promote just legislative outcomes. It also helps to explain what governments owe to citizens with minority political views. (shrink)

A common question asked among egalitarians involves the extent to which responsibility should play a deciding factor in assessing the acceptability of inequalities. So-called luck egalitarians agree that instances of genuine choice are decisive in attributing responsibility for disadvantage, and in justifying unequal distributions of social goods. In this exciting new contribution to this literature, the author explores the correct place to locate the cut between choice and chance. In doing so, he lays out a novel approach for identifying inequalities (...) for which it is fair to hold one responsible, and those for which it is not. The argument--which builds on a thread of intellectual history that runs through Marx and Mill into more contemporary thinkers like Cohen and Rawls--provides a compelling case for rejecting a highly influential theory of strong property rights that has been inherited from Locke, and which we find in contemporary defenses of strong entitlements such as Robert Nozick's. The result is an egalitarian position which treats responsibility seriously, while maintaining our liberal commitments to impartiality and non-arbitrariness in the distribution of rights and responsibilities in contemporary society. (shrink)

Defenders of physicalism often point to the reduction of chemistry to quantum physics as a paradigm for the reduction of the rest of reality to a microphysical foundation. This argument is based, however, on a misreading of the philosophical significance of the quantum revolution. A hylomorphic interpretation of quantum thermodynamics and chemistry, in which parts and wholes stand in a mutually determining relationship, better fits both the empirical facts and the actual practice of scientists. I argue that only a hylomorphic (...) interpretation of quantum mechanics is able to treat thermodynamic quantities, such as temperature and entropy, as genuinely real, which in turn provides grounds for the reality of the direction of time and of molecular structure. (shrink)

Classically, gratitude is a tri-polar construal, logically ordering a benefactor, a benefice, and a beneficiary in a favour-giving-receiving situation. Grammatically, the poles are distinguished and bound together by the prepositions ”to’ and ”for’; so I call this classic concept ”to-for’ gratitude. Classic religious gratitude follows this schema, with God as the benefactor. Such gratitude, when felt, is a religious experience, and a reliable readiness or ”habit’ of such construal is a religious virtue. However, atheists have sometimes felt an urge or (...) need for an analogous experience and virtue of gratitude, and theists sometimes feel intellectual discomfort with classical theistic gratitude on consideration of the misfortunes that characterize our life along with its blessings. In response, another conception of religious gratitude has been attempted, a construal that lacks the to-for structure. This paper probes the significance of the benefactor for gratitude, both secular and religious, and, with Søren Kierkegaard’s help, some features of the theology of classical religious gratitude that dissolve the problem of misfortunes. (shrink)

There has been a long-standing debate about the relationship of predictability and determinism. Some have maintained that determinism implies predictability while others have maintained that predictability implies determinism. Many have maintained that there are no implication relations between determinism and predictability. This summary is, of course, somewhat oversimplified and quick at least in the sense that there are various notions of determinism and predictability at work in the philosophical literature. In this essay I will focus on what I take to (...) be the Laplacean vision for determinism and predictability. While many forms of predictability are inconsistent with this vision, I argue that a suitably restricted notion of predictability, consistent with the practice of physicists, is implied by the Laplacean notion of determinism. It is argued that limitations on predictability are of an in principle nature in the Appendix. (shrink)

Government’s use of imprisonment raises distinctive moral issues. Even if government has broad authority to make and to enforce law, government may not be entitled to use imprisonment as a punishment for all the criminal laws it is entitled to make. Indeed, there may be some serious crimes that it is wrong to punish with imprisonment, even if the conditions of imprisonment are humane and even if no adequate alternative punishments are available.

The concept of contextual emergence is proposed as a non-reductive, yet welldefined relation between different levels of description of physical and other systems. It is illustrated for the transition from statistical mechanics to thermodynamical properties such as temperature. Stability conditions are crucial for a rigorous implementation of contingent contexts that are required to understand temperature as an emergent property. It is proposed that such stability conditions are meaningful for contextual emergence beyond physics as well.

In response to Frederick Schauer's book The Force of Law, I argue that the available evidence indicates that non-coercive law could influence many people's behavior. It may sometimes be best to forgo coercive enforcement of an important law.

The current debate on “free agency” seems to highlight the romantic aspects of free agent and considers it a genuine response to changing economic conditions (e.g., high-unemployment rate, importance of knowledge in the labor market, the eclipse of organizational loyalty, and self pride). Little attention, if any, has been given to the religious root of the free agency concept and its persistent existence across history. In this paper, the current discourse on free agency and the conditions that have led to (...) its emergence are briefly discussed. The paper focuses on the theological perspectives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on the concept. Implications for management and business organizations are provided. (shrink)

The Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport (ESCRTs) drive membrane remodeling in a variety of cellular processes that include the formation of endosomal intralumenal vesicles (ILVs) during multivesicular body (MVB) biogenesis. During MVB sorting, ESCRTs recognize ubiquitin (Ub) attached to membrane protein cargo and execute ILV formation by controlling the activities of ESCRT‐III polymers regulated by the AAA‐ATPase Vps4. Exactly how these events are coordinated to ensure proper cargo loading into ILVs remains unclear. Here we discuss recent work documenting the (...) ability of Bro1, an ESCRT‐associated Ub‐binding protein, to coordinate ESCRT‐III and Vps4‐dependent ILV biogenesis with upstream events such as cargo recognition. (shrink)

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)

The seven deadly sins have provided gossip, amusement, and the plots of morality plays for nearly fifteen hundred years. In Wicked Pleasures, well-known philosopher, business ethicist, and admitted sinner Robert C. Solomon brings together a varied group of contributors for a new look at the old catalogue of sins. Solomon introduces the sins as a group, noting their popularity and pervasiveness. From the formation of the canon by Pope Gregory the Great, the seven have survived the sermonizing of the (...) Reformation, the Inquisition, the Enlightenment, the brief French reign of supreme reason, the apotheoses of capitalism, communism, secular humanism and postmodernism, the writings of numerous rabbis and evangelical moralists, two series in the New York Times, and several bad movies. Taking their cue from this remarkable history, the contributors, including Thomas Pynchon, allowed one sin apiece, provide a non-sermonizing and relatively light-hearted romp through the domain of the deadly seven. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE MODALITY OF BEING ROBERT c. BEISSEL Phoenix, Arizona " It must be of itself that the divine thought thinks." Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 12, c. 9. ST. THOMAS IS AS Neoplatonic as Plotinus in his awareness that Being is not being and that being is not Being.1 Yet, like St. Augustine, St. Thomas knew that being is closer to Being than to itself; he knew that beyond the (...) question " Why being rather than nothing? " lay another, a more baffling one, namely, " Why being rather than only Being? " That being is not Being is indisputable. The philosopher seeks to understand how, in spite of that, being is and why. How to understand being while really distinguishing it from Being without diminishing Being-such is the puzzle. The difficulty lies in finding its answer without denying or changing the terms of the question, no matter how hard those terms may be. A problem is sometimes underestimated, even by one who knows its answer, because its answer is not really understood. A school child may not think the question "Why is the earth round? " difficult, when by rote it knows that gravity causes all earthly bodies to fall to a center. Only when the child perceives that gravity may not be easy to understand does it appreciate the difficulty of the question. St. Thomas cannot be accused of underestimating the problem 1 Two notes : one on terminology and one on citations. First, " Being " here signifies ens primum, the god, the creator; "being " signifies being composed of potentiality and act, including both material and immaterial substance and accidents, ens creatum. Second, citations are given below only for points of Aristotelian-Thomistic sources which the specialist reader may want to verify or into which that reader may wish to inquire further. For the rest, it has been presumed the reader is familiar enough with the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical tradition to recognize the common doctrine of the school. 49 50 ROBERT C. BEISSEL of being. He knew that, when Being is shown to be the cause of being, a puzzling implication follows, namely, that Being is the immediate analogical cause of being. The following pages detail the problem this implication presents and the solution it finds in the work of St. Thomas. I The philosophical ancient history of demiurges and intermediate intelligences supplied to keep Being decently removed from being attests to the difficulty of understanding what it means to say that Being is the immediate cause of being. Moderns deny the existence of Being for much the same reason that ancient philosophers placed intermediaries between Being and being: the ancients thought being unworthy of Being; the moderns think being so evidently imperfect that nothing like Being could be responsible for it. Although it lacks similarly clear historical witness, the difficulty of understanding what it means to say that Being is an analogical cause of being is no less striking. Univocal causes are of the same species as their effects and, therefore, are distinct from them numerically by reason of subject or matter. But, while analogical causes are specifically different from the subjects in which their effects are wrought, the perfections they cause in them are not distinct from the perfections of those causes. Indeed, those perfections in cause and effect are identical, not just in species but in number.2 Examples may be helpful here. Agents of natural generation are univocal causes of their issue, not only in factum esse, 2 Summa Theol. 1-2, q. 20, a. 3, ad 3. St. Thomas refers to this distinction in many places, e.g., 1, q. 4, aa. 2, 3c and ad 3; q. 13, a. Sc and ad 1; q. 104, a.1; Contra Gentes, 2, c. 21; 3, c. 65; 4, c. 7; De Ver., q. 10, a. 12, ad 3; and many other places in the works cited as well as in other works. (The interested reader is best advised to look at the Tabula Aurea for the distinction under the entry Causa.) It goes without saying that all talk of "cause" here presumes an Aristotelian notion of causality, not a Humean one. All causes actually causing exist simultaneously with their effects for as... (shrink)

Heidegger's "Appropriation" of Dilthey before Being and Time ROBERT C. SCHARFF IN 199 4, in his famous Time-lecture to the Marburg Theological Society, Heidegger makes it "the first principle of all hermeneutics" that gaining access to history rests upon understanding what it means to be historical? Three years later, in Being and Time, he announces that he has achieved this understanding, for the purpose of his ontological questioning, through an "appropriation" of Dilthey's work, "confirmed and strengthened by the theses (...) of Count Yorck. ''~ Now, thanks to the recent reconstructions of Heidegger's early lecture courses, we know that this appropriation process took nearly ten years, that Heidegger first worked out his conception of philosophy as a "hermeneutical way" in terms of this process, and hence that it contributed much more to the shaping of SZ than his published work suggests.~ In fact, the record shows that it was a Der Begriff der Zeit: Vortrag vor der Marburger Theologenschaft Juli z924, ed. Hartmut Tietjen ; cited from the bilingual edition, The Concept of Time, trans. W. McNeill , 2o . ' I refer, of course, to the famous opening line of Being and Time's Section 77, where Heidegger explains that his analysis of the problem of history "has grown out of the appropriation [Aneignung] of Dilthey's.. (shrink)

Some of the most intriguing issues in the study of cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development arise in the debate over nature versus nurture; a debate difficult to resolve because it is difficult to separate the respective contributions of genes and environment to development. The most powerful approach to this separation is through longitudinal adoption studies. The Colorado Adoption Project is the only longitudinal adoption study in existence examining development continuously from birth to adolescence, which makes it a unique, powerful, (...) and tremendously valuable resource. CAP is an ongoing assessment of 245 adopted children and 245 biological control children assessed from birth to early adolescence. This book is the fourth in a series describing CAP results. This latest volume, edited by four eminent researchers in developmental psychology, builds on the large body of research already generated by investigating the role of genes and environments on early adolescent development. Because it is the only volume on the most comprehensive investigation of the effect of genes and environments on early adolescent development, this work will be invaluable to researchers in developmental, cognitive, and social psychology. (shrink)

We have no schema for comprehending how a radical revision of our conceptual scheme such as that embraced by "eliminative materialism" could possibly be rationally justified. This general point is illustrated and pressed through an examination of richard rorty's classic defense of the "disappearance form of the identity theory." it is argued that 1) though more standard critiques of rorty fail, 2) rorty fails to make out the case for the view that incorrigibility" is the "mark of the mental" to (...) the exclusion of intentionality, And 3) the paradigmatic elimination of demons a explanatory entities cannot be extended to yield a justification for the elimination of the mental. (shrink)

I would like to defend a conception of life that many of us in philosophy practice but few of us preach, and with it a set of virtues that have often been ignored in ethics. In short, I would like to defend what philosopher Sam Keen, among many others, has called the passionate life. It is neither exotic nor unfamiliar. It is a life defined by emotions, by impassioned engagement and belief, by one or more quests, grand projects, embracing affections. (...) It is also sometimes characterized in terms of frenzy, vaulting ambition, essentially insatiable goals, impossible affections. I want to contrast this conception of life with ordinary morality and “being a good person,” although for obvious reasons I do not want to say that one must give up the latter in pursuing the former. This is a mistake that Nietzsche often suggests with his “immor-alist” posturing and warrior metaphors, but I am convinced—on a solid textual basis—that he intended no such result. Nor do I want to dogmatically assert any superiority of a passionate, engaged life over a life that is more calm and routine. On the other hand, I do want to raise the question whether mere proper living, obedience to the law, utilitarian “rational choice” calculations, respect for others' rights and for contracts, and a bit of self-righteousness is all there is to a good life, even if one “fills in” the nonmoral spaces with permissible pleasures and accomplishments. Even a greatly enriched version of Kant, in other words, such as that recently defended by Barbara Herman, unfairly denigrates a kind of life that many of us deem desirable. (shrink)

The paper addresses a problem for the unification of quantum physics with the new Aristotelianism: the identification of the members of the category of substance. I outline briefly the role that substance plays in Aristotelian metaphysics, leading to the postulating of the Tiling Constraint. I then turn to the question of which entities in quantum physics can qualify as Aristotelian substances. I offer an answer: the theory of thermal substances, and I construct a fivefold case for thermal substances, based on (...) the irreversibility of time, the definition of thermodynamic concepts, spontaneous symmetry breaking, phase transitions, and chemical form. (shrink)

It is here argued that functionalist constraints on psychology do not preclude the applicability of classic forms of reduction and, therefore, do not support claims to a principled, or de jure, autonomy of psychology. In Part I, after isolating one minimal restriction any functionalist theory must impose on its categories, it is shown that any functionalism imposing an additional constraint of de facto autonomy must also be committed to a pure functionalist--that is, a computationalist--model for psychology. Using an extended parallel (...) to the reduction of Mendelian to molecular genetics, it is shown in Parts II and III that, contrary to the claims of Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, there is no inconsistency between computational models and classical reductionism: neither plurality of physical realization nor plurality of function are inconsistent with reductionism as defended by Ernest Nagel. Employing the results of Part I, the conclusions of Parts II and III are generalized in Part IV to cover any version of functionalism whatsoever; thus, functionalism and reductionism are shown to be consistent. It is urged in conclusion that although a de facto form of autonomy is defensible, there are sound methodological grounds for unconditionally rejecting any principled version of the autonomy of psychology. (shrink)

Finance orthodoxy views finance capital as privately supplied, inherently scarce, and limited to assets accumulated by rentiers and held in financial institutions to be “intermediated” between virtuous savers and needful end users. But this “intermediated scarce private capital” orthodoxy is false and profoundly antagonistic to both democracy and productive investment. This article offers a more accurate portrayal that captures the critical role the public plays in generating and allocating its own full faith and credit in monetized form. The financial system (...) then looks like a franchise arrangement in which the public is franchiser and the institutions dispensing its full faith and credit are its franchisees. A post-capital-scarcity account of publicly underwritten finance explicitly recognizes both the propriety and the necessity of the public’s taking an active role in modulating and allocating its credit aggregates across the economy it constitutes. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to draw a connection between a semantical theory of conditional statements and the theory of conditional probability. First, the probability calculus is interpreted as a semantics for truth functional logic. Absolute probabilities are treated as degrees of rational belief. Conditional probabilities are explicitly defined in terms of absolute probabilities in the familiar way. Second, the probability calculus is extended in order to provide an interpretation for counterfactual probabilities--conditional probabilities where the condition has zero probability. (...) Third, conditional propositions are introduced as propositions whose absolute probability is equal to the conditional probability of the consequent on the antecedent. An axiom system for this conditional connective is recovered from the probabilistic definition. Finally, the primary semantics for this axiom system, presented elsewhere, is related to the probabilistic interpretation. (shrink)

Abstract:Should the responsibilities of business managers be understood independently of the social circumstances and “market forces” that surround them, or (in accord with empiricism and the social sciences) are agents and their choices shaped by their circumstances, free only insofar as they act in accordance with antecedently established dispositions, their “character”? Virtue ethics, of which I consider myself a proponent, shares with empiricism this emphasis on character as well as an affinity with the social sciences. But recent criticisms of both (...) empiricist and virtue ethical accounts of character deny even this apparent compromise between agency and environment. Here is an account of character that emphasizes dynamic interaction both in the formation and in the interplay between personal agency and responsibility on the one hand and social pressures and the environment on the other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Robert C. Solomon IN DEFENSE OF SENTIMENTALITY "A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." —Oscar Wilde, De Profundis. 66TA That's Wrong with Sentimentality?"1 That tide of Mark JefV V ferson's 1983 Mindessay already indicates a great deal notonly about the gist of his article but about a century-old prejudice that has been devastating to ethics and literature (...) alike. According to that prejudice, it goes without saying that there is something wrong with it, even if it is difficult to put one's finger on it. To be called "sentimental" is to be ridiculed, or dismissed. Sentimentality is a weakness, it suggests hypocrisy. Or, perhaps it is the fact that sentimental people are so... so embarrassing. (How awkward it is talking or sitting next to someone weeping or gushing, when one is dry-eyed and somber.) Or, perhaps it is the well-confirmed fact that sentimentalists have such poor taste, and sentimental literature is, above all, literature that is cheap, superficial, and manipulative—in other words, verbal kitsch. Such mawkish literature jerks tears from otherwise sensible readers, and sentimentalists are those who actually enjoy that humiliating experience. Perhaps that is why Oscar Wilde thought that sentimentalists were really cynics ("Sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism").2 Or, perhaps what bothers us is what bothered Michael Tanner, that sentimental people indulge themselves in their feelings instead of doing what should be done.3 It is often said that the problem is that sentimentality and sentimental literature alike give us a false view of the world, distort our thinking and substitute a "saccharine" portrait of the world in place ofwhat we all know to be the horrible realities. Moreover, as Jefferson more than merely suggests, the "simple-minded sympathies " ofsentimentality might actually promote fascism and racism. Mary Midgley similarly suggests that sentimentality leads to brutality.4 But Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 304-323 Robert C. Solomon305 even where sentimentality is a harmless diversion—a Daphne du Maurier novel on a sad Saturday afternoon—it seems to be all but agreed that sentimentality is no virtue even ifit is not, like cruelty and hypocrisy, intrinsically vicious. Something is wrong with sentimentality; the only question is, what is it that is wrong? In this essay, I will argue that there is nothing wrong with sentimentality. Of course, like any quasi-ethical category, it admits of unwarranted excesses and hypocritical abuses, and is prone to various pathological distortions. But the prejudice against sentimentality, I want to argue, is ill-founded and in fact is an extension ofthat all-too-familiar contempt for the passions in Western literature and philosophy. Our disdain for sentimentality is the rationalist's discomfort with any display of emotion, warranted as well as unwarranted, appropriate as well as inappropriate. It is as ifthe very word, "sentimentality," has been loaded with the connotations of "too much"—too much feeling and too litde common sense and rationality, as if these were opposed instead of mutually supportive. It is as if sentimentality and its sentiments are never warranted and always inappropriate. The word has come to be used as the name of a deficiency or a weakness if not, as some critics have written, a malaise. But I take sentimentality to be nothing more nor less than the "appeal to tender feelings," and though one can manipulate and abuse such feelings (including one's own), and though they can on occasion be misdirected or excessive, there is nothing wrong with them as such and hence nothing (in that respect) wrong with literature that provokes us, that "moves" us, to abstract affection or weeping. Sentimentality implies no deficiency in one's rational faculties and does not imply any inappropriateness, unwillingness, or lack of readiness to act. Sentimentality does not involve any distortion of the world and it does not impede but rather prepares and motivates us to react in "the real world." It is not an escape from reality or responsibility, but, quite to the contrary, provides the precondition for ethical engagement rather than an obstacle to it. Historically, I want to trace the fate of sentimentality to... (shrink)