Some recent scholars have argued that Spinoza's conception of causation should be understood in terms of the Aristotelian notion of a formal cause. I argue that while they are right to identify causation in Spinoza as a relation of entailment from an essence, they are mistaken about its philosophical pedigree. I examine three suggested lines of influence: (a) the late scholastic conception of emanation; (b) early modern philosophy of mathematics; and (c) Descartes's notion of the causa sui. In each case, (...) the evidence indicates that causation in Spinoza should be categorized in Aristotelian terms as efficient and not formal. (shrink)

I address an apparent conflict between Spinoza’s concepts of immanent causation and acting/doing [agere]. Spinoza apparently holds that an immanent cause undergoes [patitur] whatever it does. Yet according to his stated definition of acting and undergoing in the Ethics, this is impossible; to act is to be an adequate cause, while to undergo is to be merely a partial cause. Spinoza also seems committed to God’s being the adequate cause of all things, and, in a well-known passage, appears to deny (...) categorically that God is capable of undergoing. How then can God also be the immanent cause of all things, as Spinoza claims? On the basis of a close reading of the passage in question, I argue that Spinoza actually distinguishes between two senses of undergoing. An immanent cause undergoes not by being a partial cause but rather by being the metaphysical subject of its effect. While this sense of undergoing has its roots in scholasticism, Spinoza’s willingness to attribute such a capacity to undergo to God is idiosyncratic and reveals important ways in which his understanding of essence, perfection, and causation differs from the scholastic model. (shrink)

Leslie Stephen, author, literary critic, social commentator and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, published his two-volume History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century in 1876. This led him to further investigation and study of utilitarianism, whose proponents believed that human action should be guided by the principle of ensuring the happiness of the greatest number of people. While working on many other projects, especially the Dictionary, and haunted by domestic tragedy in the sudden death (...) of his second wife in 1895, Stephen struggled for two decades with this undertaking, calling it the 'utilitarian bog': the long-awaited three-volume work was finally published in 1900. Volume 3 examines John Stuart Mill, the son of James Mill, philosopher, economist and a proponent of utilitarianism who was influential in the development of political liberalism. (shrink)

The past two decades have seen an outpouring of work in legal theory that is self-consciously critical of aspects of American law and the institutions of the liberal state. In this lively volume, eminent scholars in philosophy, law, and political science respond to this recent scholarship by exploring what constitutes a "radical" critique of the law, examining such theories as critical legal studies, feminist theory and theories of "difference," and critical race theory. The authors consider whether the critiques advanced in (...) recent legal theory can truly be called radical and what form a radical critique of American law should take. Writing at the cutting edge of the critique of critical legal theory, they offer insights first on critical legal scholarship, then on feminist political and legal theory. A third group of contributions questions the radicalness of these approaches in light of their failure to challenge fundamental aspects of liberalism, while a final section focuses on current issues of legal reform through critical views on criminal punishment, including observations on rape and hate speech. Each major essay describes the underlying principles in the development of a radical legal theory and addresses unresolved questions relating to it, while accompanying commentaries present conflicting views. The resulting dialogue explores wide-ranging issues like equity, value relativism, adversarial and empathic legal advocacy, communitarianism and the social contract, impartiality and contingency, "natural" law, and corrective justice. A common thread for many of the articles is a focus on the social dimension of society and law, which finds the individualism of prevailing liberal theories too limiting. Radical Critiques of the Law is particularly unique in presenting critical and feminist approaches in one volume-along with skeptical commentary about just how radical some critiques really are. Proposing alternative critiques that embody considerably greater promise of being truly radical, it offers provocative reading for both philosophers and legal scholars by showing that many claims to radicalism are highly problematic at best. (shrink)

SCSS President Stephen M. Krason wrote this letter in response to a review about a book he edited and contributed to in the SCSS’s Catholic Social Thought Book Series, The Crisis of Religious Liberty: Reflections from Law, History, and Catholic Social Thought. The review, which appeared in The Journal of Church and State, was mostly favorable to the book but made erroneous assertions and a false and unmerited conclusion about the sources Krason used in his Afterword in the book. (...) Krason also sent the letter to the editor of the Journal, but they apparently don’t run letters and did not make an exception with this one. Krason also sent a copy of this letter to the other contributors to the book and includes it here out of a sense of the need to have a public record of a response to a published book review that, of course, was publicly disseminated. (shrink)

Published more than twenty years ago, Stephen Eric Bronner's bold defense of socialism remains a seminal text for our time. Treating socialism as an ethic, reinterpreting its core categories, and critically confronting its early foundations, Bronner's work offers a reinvigorated "class ideal" and a new perspective for progressive politics in the twentieth century. _Socialism Unbound_ is an extraordinary work of political history that revisits the pivotal figures of the labor movement: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and (...) Rosa Luxemburg. Examining their contributions as well as their flaws, Bronner shows how critical innovation gave way to dogma. New practical problems have arisen, and this volume engages with the relationship between class and social movements, institutional accountability and democratic participation, economic justice and market imperatives, and internationalism and identity. With a foreword by Dick Howard and a new introduction by the author, Bronner's classic study remains indispensable for scholars and activists alike. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2015 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. It discusses the seminal year 1965, when so many of our current social, cultural, and political problems and our difficulties in the Church began to take shape. It discusses the nature of the “new direction” that became evident that year, how crucial trends took shape, and how the developments of (...) that year led to others in the short or long run. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly in Crisis and The Wanderer. It discusses the tragic case of Charlie Gard, the baby who a U.K. hospital would not discharge so his parents could take him to the U.S. for experimental treatment for a rare, normally terminal DNA disorder that might have saved his life. Krason says that the case illustrated a number of dangerous current trends in Western (...) political societies: the advancement of the euthanasia/“quality of life” mindset, the suppression of parental rights by both child protective-type agencies and courts that are overly-deferential to them, runaway judicial power generally, the increasing authoritarianism of functional experts, and the unwillingness of elected political officials and leaders to come to the aid of the citizenry by standing up to them and the unelected bureaucrats and judges who protect them and more generally to uphold the traditional legal norms and principles that they are violating. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2015 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. It discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision on same-sex “marriage,” Obergefell v. Hodges, and its likely implications for religious liberty, true marriage, and children. He says it is the latest expression of concocted rights under the Court’s “substantive-due-process” doctrine. He suggests ways to respond to the decision politically (...) and legally—by citizens, organizations, and the use of executive power by a sound president in the near future, and by the Church. (shrink)

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Elements of Political Science" by Stephen Butler Leacock. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

L'importance de Duns Scot (1265?-1308) pour l'histoire de la métaphysique et de l'éthique n'est plus à démontrer. En demandant à Olivier Boulnois de recueillir ces études, Philosophie tente de se faire l'écho de la floraison récente de travaux consacrés à cet auteur, aussi bien à l'étranger qu'en France. L'article de Stephen Dumont souligne la place fondamentale de Scot dans l'histoire de la métaphysique. Mais au lieu de se centrer sur la tradition moderne de la métaphysique transcendantale (de Suarez à (...) Kant), il insiste sur le fait que Scot résout l'énigme de la Métaphysique d'Aristote en réduisant sa dimension théologique de celle-ci à sa dimension ontologique. La philosophie scotiste apparaît ainsi comme l'aboutissement d'une exploration systématique des possibilités d'interprétation ouvertes par le texte aristotélicien. L'étude d'Olivier Boulnois fait la transition entre la métaphysique et l'éthique. Elle s'interroge sur le fondement métaphysique de l'éthique scotiste et montre comment le primat d'une volonté libre, et, dans le monde fini, la contingence de la loi morale, s'accompagnent d'une objectivité du bien. La rigueur de la liberté n'est précisément pas l'arbitraire. Gérard Sondag, quant à lui, pose, à partir d'un point très précis d'exégèse aristotélicienne - pour quelle raison le citoyen courageux expose-t-il sa vie quand la Cité est en danger? - la question du fondement éthique du sacrifice de soi. En rejetant, dans sa réponse, toute éthique de l'intérêt personnel, et en posant une objectivité de la norme éthique indépendante de notre propre avantage, Scot ouvre une voie qui conduit à la morale normative de Kant. Duns Scot apparaît ainsi à la fois comme le refondateur de la métaphysique comme discipline transcendantale et comme un penseur original de l'éthique. Unissant ces deux dimensions, il est l'auteur d'une véritable métaphysique de l'éthique. (shrink)

Sulla base del ms. Vat. Borg. 39 viene edita la quaestio I del Quodlibet IV. Nell'introduzione l'A. ricorda le posizioni espresse da Enrico di Gand, Duns Scoto, Gerardo da Bologna e Erveo Natale sul tema in questione. La posizione di Guido sull'analogia dell'essere, per quanto originale, si costituisce come una valida alternativa alla opinio communis rappresentata da Gerardo da Bologna, Erveo Natale e da molti altri autori attivi tra la fine del XIII sec. e gli inizi del XIV.

A controversial life -- School life -- Family life -- Public life/private life -- Love life -- Writing life -- Pirate life -- An armed and neutral life -- A life concluded -- A life continued -- Afterword -- Overviews of the works of Søren Kierkegaard.

I defend the idea that the fact that no system is entirely isolated can be used to explain the successful use of the microcanonical distribution in statistical mechanics. The argument turns on claims about what is needed for an adequate explanation of this fact: I argue in particular that various competing explanations do not meet reasonable conditions of adequacy, and that the most striking lacuna in Interventionism – its failure to explain the ‘arrow of time’ – is no real defect.

Marshalling psychological and sociological theory and research, and drawing upon extensive clinical experiences as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, the author explores the various dimensions of cloning. Clone Being attempts to anticipate possible consequences for a clone, his or her 'parents' and family, and society.

The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a transition in my scholarly life. Specifically, I shifted from being a postdoctoral fellow in an anthropology department at a traditional university to a tenure track position as an assistant professor at an institute for bioethics and health humanities within an academic health center. This development has been instructive, partly because I have begun learning about how the political economies of academic medicine and the traditional university differ, align, and respectively shape institutional research cultures. My (...) primary research interests are focused on ethical and socio-technical issues in infectious disease research and control, including in initiatives that are... (shrink)

Now let us imagine, if you please, a tiny worm living in the blood, . . . . The worm would be living in the blood as we are living in our part of the universe, and it would regard each individual particle as a whole, not a part, and it would have no idea as to how all the parts are controlled by the overall nature of the blood and compelled to mutual adaptation as the overall nature of the (...) blood requires, so as to agree with one another in a definite relation. . . .Now all the bodies of Nature can and should be conceived in the same way as we have here conceived the blood; . . . . Now since the nature of the universe, unlike the nature of the blood, is not limited, but is absolutely infinite, its parts are modified by the nature of this infinite in infinite ways and are compelled to undergo infinite variations. (Spinoza, ESL, Letter 32, 245–6). (shrink)

We review the argument that latent image formation is a measurement in which the state vector collapses, requiring an enhanced noise parameter in objective reduction models. Tentative observation of a residual noise at this level, plus several experimental bounds, imply that the noise must be colored, and hence frame dependent and non-relativistic. Thus a relativistic objective reduction model, even if achievable in principle, would be incompatible with experiment; the best one can do is the non-relativistic CSL model. This negative conclusion (...) has a positive aspect, in that the non-relativistic CSL reduction model evades the argument leading to the Conway–Kochen “Free Will Theorem”. (shrink)

An overview of Zhu Xi's moral psychology, with a special focus on the metaphysical underpinnings and the relations between heartmind (xin), emotions (qing), and nature (xing). The authors explain how Zhu uses his account to balance the demand for independent standards of assessment with his commitment to ethical norms that virtuous agents can embrace wholeheartedly.

The long human odyssey of self-discovery has reached a crucial stage: everything we do affects everyone and everything else - and we know it. The next hundred years will bring more change than we can easily imagine: more opportunities for more people to achieve the fulfilment of a good life, and more risks that could result in catastrophic harm to the entire planet.Viewed geopolitically, the main question is whether the world-views of the world's most important and influential powers - China (...) and America (the one fundamentally Confucian, the other essentially individualist) - can be made to work together constructively.At the same time, on a deeper level, the even greater question is how the irreversible fact of urbanisation may nurture healthy and mature human individuality, such that the accumulated wisdom of the world's great cultures becomes mutually transforming and enriching.This bold and wide-ranging book explores those questions, with all the risks and opportunities they hold for generations still to com"--Publisher information. (shrink)