When young children first begin to ask 'why?' they embark on a journey with no final destination. The need to make sense of the world as a whole is an ultimate curiosity that lies at the root of all human religions. It has, in many cultures, shaped and motivated a more down to earth scientific interest in the physical world, which could therefore be described as penultimate curiosity. These two manifestations of curiosity have a history of connection that goes back (...) deep into the human past. Tracing that history all the way from cave painting to quantum physics, this book sets out to explain the nature of the long entanglement between religion and science: the ultimate and the penultimate curiosity. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner has long been a source of controversy and has given rise to a number of important studies, including this major breakthrough in Nietzsche scholarship, first published in 1982. In this work Hollinrake contends that the nature and extent of the anti-Wagnerian pastiche and polemic in _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ is arguably the most important factor in the association between the two. Thus Wagner, as the purveyor of a particular brand of Schopenhauerian pessimism, is here revealed (...) as one of the principle sources – and targets – of _Zarathustra_. Whilst addressed primarily to students of German Literature, this book will also be of interest to musicians, philosophers and students of the history of culture and ideas. (shrink)

Wagner is thought to be one of the first Modern Architects, yet a number of writers have argued that his most famous Modern building, the “Postsparkasse,” violates the most basic principles of Modern Architecture; principles that Wagner himself helped develop. This essay develops a new interpretation of this building by placing it in the context of fin de siècle Viennese culture. This interpretation shows that the “Postsparkasse” is a Modern building, but it also shows that the common understanding (...) of “Modern Architecture” needs to be revised. It also suggests a new role for architecture in the contemporary world. (shrink)

De wortels van de vijandschap jegens Wagner liggen in de politieke ontwikkeling van de twintigste eeuw, waarin de linkse critici van Wagner de misdaden van Hitler hebben teruggelezen in zijn opera's. Scruton ziet in de werken van Wagner een grootse poging om de onttovering van het moderne leven een halt toe te roepen en voor de mens een deur te openen naar een bovenmenselijke kosmische orde.

In Death-Devoted Heart Roger Scruton argues that Tristan und Isolde has profound religious meaning. Blending philosophy, criticism and musicology, he shows the work is as relevant today as it was to Wagner's contemporaries. Scruton's analysis touches on the nature of tragedy, the significance of ritual sacrifice, and the meaning of redemption.

Het thema van de verlossing en het onverbrekelijke verband tussen verlossing, liefde en dood loopt als een rode draad door Wagners late opera's. Scruton onderzoekt hoe dit thema vorm krijgt in de christelijke traditie, de Griekse tragedies en in de opera's van Wagner en dan met name in Tristan en Isolde. Hij analyseert nauwkeurig de verschillende 'settings' waarin verlossing gedaante krijgt. Zo beschouwt hij verschillende offerrituelen, de rol van de jacht daarbij, de gemeenschap tegenover het individu, de rol van (...) geweld. Ook gaat hij in op hoe de slachtoffers zelf tegen hun opoffering aankijken. Alleen zo valt te begrijpen hoe zij verlossing kunnen vinden. En dat de liefde deze verlossing biedt. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

This six volume Routledge Library Edition set is dedicated to the work of key nineteenth-century German thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose hugely influential work in the field of philosophy continues to be felt to this day. The six volumes, published between 1948 and 1988, represent a truly wide-ranging analysis of Nietzsche’s life and work, offering an excellent overview of the cannon of critical analysis and interpretation on Nietzsche in the twentieth century. The collection covers Nietzsche’s perspectives and influence upon a variety (...) of sociological and philosophical debates, as well as placing his work in the context of contemporaries such as Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Max Stirner. (shrink)

I examine Roger Scruton's account of the religious and soteriological significance of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde . The relation between Scruton and Wagner remains unclear, and the position at issue is a curious amalgam of the two. I refer to its author as ‘Scruton's Wagner’. Scruton's Wagner argues that erotic love has religious and soteriological significance, and that the notions of religion and salvation are to be defined in terms which are shorn of any reference (...) to God. I argue that there may be good reasons for setting these limits short of God, but that Scruton's Wagner does not provide them. (shrink)

Many philosophers have devoted a lot of attention to the work of Richard Wagner. This article provides philosophical accounts of two important aspects of Wagner’s most ambitious work, the tetralogy Ring of the Nibelung. First, I examine how the musical device developed by Wagner known as the leitmotif functions in Act 1 of the second opera of Wagner’s Ring, Die Walküre, through the analysis of leitmotifs presented by Roger Scruton. I shall focus particularly on the (...) perspective that the use of this musical device provides on the love between the siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde depicted in the act. My belief is that Scruton’s account of leitmotifs helps to explain the unique character that has been attributed to this act. The second part of the article presents a more detailed examination of the significance of the love between Siegmund and Sieglinde for The Ring. Besides Scruton’s views, the interpretation of The Ring by Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht will have an important role in this examination. (shrink)

This book grew out of previously published papers of mine composed over a period of years; they have been reworked (sometimes beyond recognition) so as to form a reasonably coherent whole. Part One treats of informative inference. I argue (Chapter 2) that the traditional principle of induction in its clearest formulation (that laws are confirmed by their positive cases) is clearly false. Other formulations in terms of the 'uniformity of nature' or the 'resemblance of the future to the past' seem (...) to me hopelessly unclear. From a Bayesian point of view, 'learning from experience' goes by conditionalization (Bayes' rule). The traditional stum bling block for Bayesians has been to fmd objective probability inputs to conditionalize upon. Subjective Bayesians allow any probability inputs that do not violate the usual axioms of probability. Many subjectivists grant that this liberality seems prodigal but own themselves unable to think of additional constraints that might plausibly be imposed. To be sure, if we could agree on the correct probabilistic representation of 'ignorance' (or absence of pertinent data), then all probabilities obtained by applying Bayes' rule to an 'informationless' prior would be objective. But familiar contra dictions, like the Bertrand paradox, are thought to vitiate all attempts to objectify 'ignorance'. BuUding on the earlier work of Sir Harold Jeffreys, E. T. Jaynes, and the more recent work ofG. E. P. Box and G. E. Tiao, I have elected to bite this bullet. In Chapter 3, I develop and defend an objectivist Bayesian approach. (shrink)

Roger Ariew presents a new account of Descartes as a philosopher who sought to engage his contemporaries and society. He argues that the Principles of Philosophy was written to rival Scholastic textbooks, and considers Descartes' enterprise in contrast to the tradition it was designed to replace and in relation to the works of the first Cartesians.

Available for the first time in English, Roger's masterwork of intellectual history situates the life sciences within the larger context of French Enlightenment thought and the history of institutions.

The Zhuangzi is a deliciously protean text: it is concerned not only with personal realization, but also with social and political order. In many ways the Zhuangzi established a unique literary and philosophical genre of its own, and while clearly the work of many hands, it is one of the finest pieces of literature in the classical Chinese corpus. It employs every trope and literary device available to set off rhetorically charged flashes of insight into the most unrestrained way to (...) live one's life, free from oppressive, conventional judgments and values. The essays presented here constitute an attempt by a distinguished community of international scholars to provide a variety of exegeses of one of the Zhuangzi's most frequently rehearsed anecdotes, often referred to as "the Happy Fish debate." The editors have brought together essays from the broadest possible compass of scholarship, offering interpretations that range from formal logic to alternative epistemologies to transcendental mysticism. Many were commissioned by the editors and appear for the first time. Some of them have been available in other languages—Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish—and were translated especially for this anthology. And several older essays were chosen for the quality and variety of their arguments, formulated over years of engagement by their authors. All, however, demonstrate that the Zhuangzi as a text and as a philosophy is never one thing; indeed, it has always been and continues to be, many different things to many different people. (shrink)

Book Reviewed in this article: Israel's Prophetic Tradition: Essays in honour of Peter R. Ackroyd. Edited by Richard Coggins, Anthony Phillips and Michael Knibb, Pp.xxi, 272. Cambridge University Press, 1982, £21.00. Essays on John. By C.K. Barrett. Pp.viii, 167, London, SPCK, 1982, £10.50. The Letter to the Colossians. By Eduard Schweizer, translated by Andrew Chester. Pp.319, London, SPCK, 1982, £12.50. Foundational Theology: Jesus and the Church. By Francis Schüssler Fiorenza. Pp.xix, 326, New York Crossroad, 1984, $22.50. The Darkness of God: (...) Theology after Hiroshima. By Jim Garrison. Pp.x, 238, London, SCM Press, 1982, £5.95. Discerning the Mystery, An Essay on the Nature of neology. By Andrew Louth. Pp.xiv, 150, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, £12.50. The Tao and the Daimon: Segments of a Religious Inquiry. By Robert C. Neville. Pp.xv, 281, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1982, $34.50 ), $11.95. Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World. By James Clifford. Pp.xi, 270, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982, £21.50. Transcendence and the Sacred. Edited by A.M. Olson and L.S. Rouner. Pp.xv, 230, University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, £10.75. A History of Religious Ideas. Vol. 2: From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity. By Mircea Eliade. Translated by William R. Trask. Pp.xi, 565, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, £17.50. Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude‐Henri Racquet. By Mircea Eliade. Translated by Derek Coltman. Pp.ix, 225, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, £12.55. Religious Philosophy of Prince‐Bishop Njegosh of Montenegro. By Zika Rad. Prvulovich. Pp.xviii, 273, Birmingham, The Author, 1984, £12.50, £10.50. The Home of Meaning: The Hermeneutics of the Subject of Paul Ricoeur. By John W. Van Dengel. Pp.xxi, 333, Washington, D.C., University Press of America, 1982, $24.50, $13.25. Life Forms and Meaning Stucture. By Alfred Schutz, translated, introduced and annotated by Helmut Wagner. Pp.vi, 217, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, £11.95. The Shaping of Man: Philosophical Aspects of Sociobiology. By Roger Trigg. Pp.xx, 186. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £12.50, £5.95. Marx and Marxisms: Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series, 14. Edited by G.H.R. Parkinson. Pp.vi, 268, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £9.95. Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism. By Allen E. Buchanan. Pp.xiv, 206, London, Methuen, 1982, £12.95. Israel Satanter: Text, Structure, Idea. By Hillel Goldberg. Pp.xvii, 358, New York, Ktav, 1981, $17.50. Freud on Femininity and Faith. By Judith Van Herik. Pp.xiii, 216, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982, £17.50. Women, Reason and Nature. By Carol McMillan. Pp.x, 165, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £12.50. Supererogation: Its Status in Ethical Theory. By David Heyd. Pp.vii, 191, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £14.00. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Edited by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Finborg. Pp.xi, 1035, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £40.00. St Thomas Aquinas. By Ralph McInerny. Pp.197, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, £4.50. Yves de Vallone: The Making of an Esprit‐Fort. By James O'Higgins, S.J. Pp.viii, 248, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1982, $35.00. Religion and National Identity. Edited by Stuart Mews. Pp.xvi, 618, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, £19.50. Mortmain Legislation and the English Church, 1279–1500. By Sandra Raban. Pp.xii, 215,, Cambridge University Press, 1982, £25.00. John XXIII, Pope of the Council. By Peter Hebblethwaite. Pp.viii, 550, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1984, £14.95.iCompiled by J.F. Púglisi and S.J. Voicu. Pp.260, Rome, Centro Pro Unione, 1984, $20.00. Ireland: A Bibliography of Material held at St Deiniol's Library. Compiled by Helen C. Price. Pp.iv, 136, Hawarden, St Deiniol's, 1984, £2.50. The Later Poems, 1972–1982. By R.S. Thomas. Pp.224, London, Macmillan, 1984, £4.95. (shrink)

This article addresses a number of phenomena in the field of digital communication - disinformation, infodemics and conspiracy mania - that promote indifference regarding the distinction between truth and lies, fact and fiction, opinion and knowledge. They have thus decisively altered users' patterns of rationality and common sense and contributed to the rise of anti-democratic and anti-scientific positions. To address this complex problem, a systemic approach is provided that considers these phenomena to be factors that disturb the ethical-epistemic equilibrium between (...) uncertainty, trust and responsibility. After identifying a set of dynamics generated by these disruptive factors, three aspects are explored in depth: the polarisation and lack of a deliberative culture, the necessary correction of the social image of scientific practice, and the impact of the post-truth discourse. The article concludes with reflections on redefining the three key concepts of uncertainty, trust and responsibility in light of the demands of the digital sphere. (shrink)

In this paper, we compare the two Global Reporting Initiative reporting standards, G3.1, and the most current version G4.0. We do this through the lens of political corporate social responsibility theory, which describes the broadened understanding of corporate responsibility in a globalized world building on Habermas’ notion of deliberative democracy and ethical discourse. As the regulatory power of nation states is fading, regulatory gaps occur as side effects of transnational business. As a result, corporations are also understood to play a (...) “political role” to fill regulatory gaps and contribute to a global governance system by voluntarily engaging in self-regulation. Such corporate political action, however, is not always legitimate as it suffers from a democratic deficit. Consistent with scholars in the field of political CSR, this paper argues that only by means of communication and discourse can this drawback be avoided. That is why CSR reporting and guidelines for standardizing the disclosed CSR information is key for political CSR. By comparing the GRI standards from a political CSR perspective, one can see whether these often-used reporting guidelines fulfill the communicative requirements and whether they are adequate tools to face the challenges of the twenty-first century. We present results from a theory-derived and criteria-driven comparison of the two guidelines. Indication of the effectiveness of voluntary self-regulation is, for example, important considering the 2014 directive of the European Union to make CSR reporting mandatory. We offer a guideline-based view on current CSR theory as well as CSR reporting practice. We discuss implications for CSR theory, particularly the appropriateness of deliberation in the Habermasian sense, which is the basis of political CSR theory. We do so by introducing the notion of “uncommitted deliberation” with regard to the refined concept of materiality in GRI 4.0, which induces subjectivity and reduces data-driven comparability. Finally, we address the limitations of this research as well as research questions for future studies. (shrink)

This book explores a little-noticed tradition in the history of European political thought. From Plato to Aristotle to Tacitus and Machiavelli, and from Tocqueville to Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, political thinkers have examined the tyrannies of their times and have wondered how these tyrannies come about, how they work, and how they might be defeated. In examining this perennial problem of tyranny, Roger Boesche looks at how these thinkers borrowed from the past—thus entering into an established dialogue—to analyze (...) the present. Although obviously tyrannies are not identical over time, we can learn partial lessons from past thinkers that can help us to better understand twentieth-century tyrannies. (shrink)

Henry Rosemont, Jr., in his Against Individualism has mounted a compelling argument that foundational individualism in its various iterations has become a malevolent ideology implicated in and aggravating many of the pressing problems of our time. The overall thrust of his thesis can be stated rather simply. The industrial democracies and most of the rest of the world are dominated by a corporate capitalism the interests of which are served largely by a procedural justice grounded in a foundational individualism that (...) compounds the benefits of a few and marginalizes the possibility of realizing a distributive justice for the many. Hence, the more that academic and political forces are successful in defending... (shrink)

Population surveys of emotion offer great potential to understand subjective wellbeing, though most do not reveal how emotions other than happiness and satisfaction impact on daily lives. This article presents a case study analysis of data from Kahneman and Krueger’s (2006) Princeton Time and Affect Survey to demonstrate that the choice of emotions or affects measured in surveys does matter in determining wellbeing in contexts such as those in which gender plays an important role. It finds that that tiredness and (...) interest (excluded from Kahneman and Krueger’s wellbeing construct) comprise a large part of American women’s but not men’s unpleasant education, unpaid housework, and childcare. The article concludes by suggesting that the most appropriate method for establishing a “minimum” set of emotions is to conduct survey-based “audits” of emotions experienced in daily activities. (shrink)

This special issue of Philosophy East and West is dedicated to the inaugural meeting of the World Consortium for Research in Confucian Cultures, convened at the University of Hawai‘i and the East-West Center, October 8-12, 2014, on the theme “Confucian Values in a Changing World Cultural Order,” to explore the contributions of Confucian thought to world culture. The conference brought together leading scholars from partner institutions around the world to explore critically the meaning and value of Confucian culture in the (...) twenty-first century. The purpose of this initial meeting was to address the questions “What is the contemporary form of ‘Confucian’ culture?” “What are its historical failings and limitations?”... (shrink)

This article serves to extend a critique initiated by Allsup and Benedict in their 2008 PMER article, "The Problems of Band." Using the work of Michael Foucault as a theoretical and methodological basis, I consider ways in which today's large ensemble paradigm, particularly that of the wind band, has resulted in an ongoing antinomy in school music between those who view bands as a medium of music education and those who view bands as a medium for music education. I argue (...) that the emergence of the pedagogical band world in the United States and Canada altered the nature of wind band practices, and that the resultant bands-as-music-education paradigm can be understood in terms of issues of power and legitimacy. I strive to demonstrate how future directions in music education might benefit from a reflexive engagement with the discourses of our profession. (shrink)

Tradução do texto apresentado por Paul B. Preciado a Sociedade Psicanalitica.

L'intérêt des sciences humaines pour les rapports entre TIC, langues et savoirs n'est pas nouveau. Cependant l'intelligibilité d'une construction épistémologique des relations reste un domaine en friche dans le contexte de la mondialisation. Le présent article essaie de s'en prendre à ce vide épistémologique en interrogeant particulièrement les enjeux des langues africaines dans le travail de structuration et de dissémination du savoir global et des savoirs locaux. Ces savoirs, chacun à sa manière, tentent de se construire un statut nouveau en (...) s'insérant dans les divers marchés de la connaissance. Pour cela, ils tirent profit du renouvellement des thématiques occidentales vis-à-vis des consommateurs africains d'information scientifique. En conséquence, des politiques de productivité et de circularité des savoirs s'érigent dans des stratégies d'uniformisation épistémologique. Parallèlement, la mode de la «diversité linguistique et culturelle», censée protéger les langues et savoirs locaux, risque de les transformer en de simples objets ethnographiques.The interest of the humanities to the relationship between ICT and language knowledge is not new. However, the intelligibility of a construction epistemological relations remains a fallow field in the context of globalization. This article tries to take this empty epistemological questioning particularly the issues of African languages ​​in the work of structuring and dissemination of global knowledge and local knowledge. This knowledge, in their own way, trying to build a new status by inserting themselves into the various markets for knowledge. For this, they benefit from the renewal of western themed vis-à-vis African consumers of scientific information. As a result, productivity and political knowledge circularity themselves up in uniform epistemological strategies. Meanwhile, the fashion of the "linguistic and cultural diversity," intended to protect indigenous knowledge and languages, may turn them into mere ethnographic objects. (shrink)