Ronald Mercer - Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 410-411 Book Review Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion Jeffrey L. Kosky. Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv + 223. Cloth, $39.95. Emmanuel Levinas's thought has been a sleeping giant in continental philosophy, having influence upon many of his contemporaries while drawing minimal attention to himself. In the (...) last few years, however, as evidenced by the explosion of secondary literature on Levinas, it is clear that scholars are awakening to Levinas's importance. Jeffrey Kosky's work, Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion, joins this secondary.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 571-572 [Access article in PDF] Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xxx + 292. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $23.00. The goal of the Cambridge Companion to Philosophy series has been to "dispel the intimidation" that students and non-specialists often experience when faced with the works of a "difficult and challenging (...) thinker" (i). Indeed, Emmanuel Levinas would qualify as such a thinker, whose work is firmly rooted in two traditions: (1) the admittedly abstruse and seminal phenomenologies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and (2) Judaism, including the Talmudic tradition, the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig, as well as Levinas's experience with rampant anti-Semitism in twentieth-century Europe. The imminent danger in producing a collection with the express intent of making a challenging thinker accessible is that the force of the thought may become undermined by the process of simplification. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, however, achieves its goal as a book that not only elucidates Levinas but also provides numerous essays that even the Levinasian scholar will find useful.Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi are directly responsible for the success of the Companion. These two editors have proven themselves as adept collaborators in the area of Levinasian philosophy with their earlier contribution to Indiana University Press's series Studies in Continental Thought: Re-reading Levinas (Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, editors [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991]). This new cooperative effort offers essays that introduce Levinas's thought from the perspective of some of the many fields upon which he has had an influence including the philosophy of language, art, feminism, Judaism, phenomenology, and the philosophy of religion.Even with the many tangential fields to which Levinas's thought contributes, the Companion often refers to Derrida's metaphor which describes Levinas's work as a wave, the "same" wave, crashing on the beach with increasing demand. Derrida, however, is also partly responsible for the intensifying return of Levinas's work. Derrida's critique of Levinas's Totality and Infinity was the impetus behind Levinas's subsequent focus on language and the problematic of "how" one speaks of that which is outside being. Certainly, the Companion could have spent the majority of its pages outlining this philosophical, textual conversation, but such an explication would have compromised the accessibility of this introductory text to the non-specialists to whom this series caters. The editors, instead, chose to avoid Derrida's difficult critique while having a significant concentration of essays that deal with Levinas's philosophy of language. This allows neophyte students of Levinas to discover his intricate thought on language without necessary knowledge of the context as well as provide those scholars interested in the debate access to the most contemporary thought on the matter—at least from the Levinasian perspective. Readers are assured, then, that the Companion covers the difficult concepts of the speaking face from the early period to the later distinction of the "saying" and the "said," inspired by Derrida's critique.The Companion, unfortunately, seems one sided concerning an important aspect of Levinas's philosophy. Throughout his entire corpus, Levinas attributes his thought to the seminal work of Edmund Husserl, continually inviting his readers to begin again with Husserl's phenomenology. Rudolph Bernet contributes to this collection an outstanding analysis of Levinas's critique of Husserl, describing some of the departures that Levinas makes from Husserl's phenomenology. The rest of the Companion, however, makes note to downplay Levinas's positive indebtedness to phenomenology. Hillary Putnam promises to explain Levinas with a "minimum of reliance on any prior knowledge of the two great 'H's (Husserl/Heidegger)" (40). Adhering to her word, in an otherwise insightful essay, means that the phenomenological issue remains superficial. While it is never absent, Bernet's essay seems to have set the tone, placing Levinas in a position of opposition with Husserl with a minimum of discussion of what Levinas has called his adherence to the "spirit" of phenomenology. To the Companion's credit... (shrink)

Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management is a wide-ranging and expert analysis of the ethics of the intentional management of solar radiation. This book will be a useful tool for policy-makers, a provocation for ethicists, and an eye-opening analysis for both the scientist and the general reader with interest in climate change.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics by Hak Joon Lee, and: Democracy in Twenty-First Century America: Race, Class, Religion, and Region by Ronald B. NealReggie L. WilliamsThe Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics HAK JOON LEE Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2011. 256 pp. $25.00Democracy in Twenty-First Century America: Race, Class, Religion, and Region RONALD B. NEAL Macon, (...) GA: Mercer University Press, 2012. 138 pp. $30.00On Christmas Eve 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. asked the members of a congregation to recognize that they are—every day—interacting with many different nations all around the world as they maneuver throughout their normal daily routines. Hak Joon Lee’s The Great World House: Martin Luther King Jr. and Global Ethics examines the implications of this daily global interaction as the need for a broader ethical perspective in a shrinking world. The need begins with the realization that we do indeed inhabit a shrinking world in which our local behavior has a broader global impact. Once we recognize the moral implications of our local interaction, it becomes clear that we must learn how to live together in a broader community.But how do we speak the language of a global morality? What does a global morality look like? Lee argues that King’s metaphor of a great world house provides a structure on which to frame the content of a healthy global morality in a shrinking world. The metaphor indicates a collective understanding of all humanity as a global community (ix). The notion of a single world house moves people groups beyond rival communities with well-defined in-group and out-group barriers into what Lee describes as a global civil society where we are all seen as members of a collective in-group (13). The concept of a collective in-group helps illustrate what Lee understands to be King’s argument for a global morality; “King’s idea of a great world house redefines what the boundaries and membership of a moral community are: the great world house constitutes a single inclusive ethical community for humanity because it identifies the world as a single unified community” (53). [End Page 234]But as laudable as King’s great world house metaphor is, we are still burdened with the task of imagining a universal moral language in practice. Efforts toward the formation of universal truths have historically been death-dealing for people groups caught on the wrong side of the color line. A one-size-fits-all morality has been a procrustean bed for people who have been racialized and subordinated to white European males. Yet Lee interprets King’s method of universal engagement to begin with convictions shared at home within the particularity of his African American Christian worldview before it moves outward toward a shared vision of a global civil society. The movement from particular to universal for a public morality is unlike the historically harmful practice of universal morality. King’s universal method includes attention to four components: vision, norms, virtues, and political practices. These four components belong to what Lee depicts as a careful and intricate dialectic between what is local and what is universal in a political dialogue that seeks the end of a global civil society with shared conceptions of community and human rights.Ironically, with regard to the conversation about human rights, Lee claims that King’s formative African American interpretation of human rights was primarily informed by the Enlightenment and then blended with an African American experience: “Mostly appropriated from Christianity and the Western Enlightenment tradition, these norms [justice, freedom, and equality] obtained a new significance for African Americans in the context of the sizzling cauldron of slavery and segregation” (55). Yet one would be hard pressed to identify the presence of modern Enlightenment intellectuals within the formative theological worldview of the African American Christianity that Lee identifies. Of necessity, African American Christianity, the Christian worldview that birthed Martin Luther King Jr., was formed to deflect the white Christian worldview that was shaped by the intersection of race, religion, and empire in modernity. The Enlightenment fueled modernity’s... (shrink)

Donald Davidson holds that metaphors have no linguistic meaning in addition to their literal meaning. Max Black and Frank B. Farrell each contends that Davidson’s view is inconsistent with the fact that metaphors are appropriate objects of explication and evaluation. However, as I show, Davidson’s view actually is entirely consistent with this fact. I also argue that Black’s and Farrell’s own accounts of metaphor imply that sometimes the linguistic meaning of a sentence is other than a product of the meanings (...) of its words and its logical form, and I give a reason why accounts of metaphor with this implication are best rejected. E.M. Zemach, for his part, agrees with Davidson about what metaphors mean, but contends that, on Davidson’s recent account of language and interpretation, all metaphors turn out to be true; metaphors express novel or impractical but nonetheless literally true comparisons or categorizations. Zemach, however, I argue, has neglected the distinction between how speakers actually apply their words to things and their standards of correct application. (shrink)

Despite both positive and negative perceptions of the current state of higher education, the contemporary debate over what it is to be a university is limited. Most of all, it is limited imaginatively. The range of imagined options is narrow. The imagination has not been given anything even approaching a wide scope. As a result, our sense as to what a university could be and could become in the modern age is itself impoverished. If we are seriously to develop a (...) wide range of ideas of the university that is adequate to the challenges of the modern world, the imagination itself needs to be freed. Imagining the University seeks to address each of these sets of issues and will do so by first, identifying a very wide range of ideas of the university as it is now unfolding and could become; secondly, by evaluating those conceptions of the university with a classification of ideas of the university; and thirdly, by reflecting on the imagination itself, its current impoverishment and its possibilities. Whether studying, researching or deciding policy, this book is vital reading to all those involved in the planning and delivery of higher education. (shrink)

Reappraises the life and works of the German philosopher, finding continuity in his apparently inconsistent opinions, and characterizing Nietzsche's state of mind during his final illness.

Civil Religion offers philosophical commentaries on more than twenty thinkers stretching from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The book examines four important traditions within the history of modern political philosophy and delves into how each of them addresses the problem of religion. Two of these traditions pursue projects of domesticating religion. The civil religion tradition, principally defined by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau, seeks to domesticate religion by putting it solidly in the service of politics. The liberal tradition pursues an (...) alternative strategy of domestication by seeking to put as much distance as possible between religion and politics. Modern theocracy is a militant reaction against liberalism, and it reverses the relationship of subordination asserted by civil religion: it puts politics directly in the service of religion. Finally, a fourth tradition is defined by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Aspects of their thought are not just modern, but hyper-modern, yet they manifest an often-hysterical reaction against liberalism that is fundamentally shared with the theocratic tradition. Together, these four traditions compose a vital dialogue that carries us to the heart of political philosophy itself. (shrink)

In the course of that critical study he discusses the work of many of the most influential lawyers and philosophers of the era, including Isaiah Berlin, Richard ...

This paper is a contribution to that part of science studies known as 'the cognitive study of science'. The general goal of such studies is to understand cogni-.

Some recent physiological data indicate that the “subjective timing” of experiences can be “automatically referred backwards in time” to represent a sequence of events even though the earlier portions of associated neurophysiological activity are themselves insufficient to elicit the experience of any sensation. The challenge, then, is to explain how subjects can experience what they do in the reported ways when, if one looked just at certain neurophysiological activity, it would seem that perhaps subjects should report their sensations differently. The (...) phenomenon has seemed sufficiently remarkable to the neurobiologist John Eccles to count as evidence for mind-body dualism. This dualistic interpretation has resulted in a spirited attack by P. S. Churchland on both the physiological research and the dualistic interpretation. Her attack resulted in an equally spirited defense of the research by the primary investigator, B. Libet, where he reaffirmed his more guarded interpretation that “the temporal discrepancy creates relative difficulties for identity theory, but that these are not insurmountable”. In turn, Churchland has defended her criticism of Libet's research so that, for her, Libet's hypothesis remains “infirm and unconfirmed”. (shrink)

We show in ZFC that if there is no proper class inner model with a Woodin cardinal, then there is an absolutely definablecore modelthat is close toVin various ways.

In Rending The Veil: A Critical Look at the Ontology & Conservation of "Race," I explore the nature and existence of "race" and the question of whether the social use of racial classification ought to continue. The principal vehicle for my exploration is W. E. B. Du Bois's landmark 1897 essay "The Conservation Of Races." It is Du Bois' thesis in that essay, along with the criticism and the support it has met, that forms the focus of my work. This (...) debate, relevant to our times, can be characterized by two questions: "What is 'race?'" and "Should we conserve 'race?'" I begin by clarifying the positions of Du Bois and various classic and contemporary contributors. I examine the former question using recent metaphysical pluralist work on the reality of systems of classification: What sort of kind "race" is, whether it is natural or constructed, discovered or invented, real or nominal. In addition, I draw on the debate over social categories in the philosophy of social science, and on the systematics debate within the philosophy of biology. I maintain that "race" is not a real biological kind; nevertheless, since its social presence and impact is tremendous, it is a real human category that is site specific. In examining the latter question, I conclude that while "race" is a socially problematic category, the situation is complex and a call for its immediate elimination is not justified. I argue that in a society where racism is present, such as the U.S., "race" ought to be conserved, but only to combat racism. To prevent it, moreover, from being conserved for the wrong reasons society ought to regard it with irony; a position which expresses a socially critical perspective and distance from social categories. (shrink)