In the wake of the non-ideal theory turn in political philosophy, few have paused to ask: Is non-ideal theory a form of ideology? And perhaps even fewer have paused to ask: Is the debate between ideal/non-ideal theorists itself a form of ideology? To the first question, I argue that non-ideal theory is ideological in virtue of the fact that it rules out more utopian ways of theorizing by methodological fiat, and in so doing, risks entrenching an unjust status quo. To (...) the second question, I argue that the debate between ideal/non-ideal theorists is itself a form of ideology, one which serves to reinforce the status quo by convincing political philosophers/theorists that the most pressing problems are problems about what we should think about what we are doing. But this is false. An upshot of my argument is that we ought to abandon the ideal/non-ideal theory debate and address the pressing problems of political philosophy head-on in pluralist fashion, oscillating back and forth between these two modes of theorizing without a decision procedure to tell us when we should take up one perspective or the other. (shrink)

Shamik Dasgupta (2016) proposes to tame the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) to apply to only non-autonomous facts, which are facts that are apt for explanation. Call this strategy to tame the PSR the taming strategy. In a recent paper, Della Rocca (2020a) argues that proponents of the taming strategy, in attempting to formulate a restricted version of the PSR, nevertheless find themselves committed to endorsing a form of radical monism, which, in turn, leads right back to an untamed-PSR. Suppose, (...) for the sake of argument, that Della Rocca is right. My question is this: Is there reason to believe the principle of sufficient reason (in its untamed version)? In this paper, I argue that it is impossible for there to be a reason to believe the untamed-PSR. (shrink)

Are workers dominated? A recent suite of neo-republican and relational egalitarian philosophers think they are. Suppose they are right; that is, suppose that some workers are governed by an unjust and arbitrary power existing in labour relations, which persists even in the presence of the actual ability to exit. My question is this: does that give us reason to impose restrictions on firms? According to the so-called Efficiency Objection there are relevant trade-offs that need to be considered between the efficiency (...) of firms and the freedom of workers, and upon considering these trade-offs, we should reject workplace democracy. In this paper, I present a dilemma for the Efficiency Objection. I argue that either the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds or non-moral grounds; if the Efficiency Objection is justified on moral grounds, then it fails because efficiency cannot be valued for its own sake (it is only instrumentally good); if the Efficiency Objection is justified on non-moral grounds, then it fails because of the respect that we owe to persons as persons; therefore, the Efficiency Objection fails. (shrink)

In a recent paper published in this journal, Hughes (2019) has argued that Machery’s (2017) Dogmatism Argument is self-defeating. Machery’s (2019) reply involves giving the Dogmatism Argument an inductive basis, rather than a philosophical basis. That is, he argues that the most plausible contenders in the epistemology of disagreement all support the Dogmatism Argument; and thus, it is likely that the Dogmatism Argument is true, which gives us reason to accept it. However, Machery’s inductive argument defines the leading views in (...) terms of their citation counts. But there is no necessary connection between citation counts and truth; it is a truism that many highly cited papers over the past century have turned out to contain false arguments. This inductive information should lead Machery to revise his argument; what Machery (2019) owes—but has failed to provide—is a positive argument for ruling out another plausible contender that Hughes (2019) raises. Without such an account, Machery’s inductive case for the Dogmatism Argument fails. (shrink)

THE MOST SACRED FREEDOM includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2014 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the seventh annual conference sponsored by Mercer Universitys Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for Americas Founding Principles. Together, these essays explore the great principle of religious liberty by charting its development in the Western tradition and reconsidering its place at Americas founding. The book begins with a comparison between the flood accounts in Genesis and the (...) Mesopotamian Atra-Has's and advances all the way to the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. The intervening chapters examine the contributions of figures such as Emperor Julian, Roger Williams, Cecilius Calvert, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the American Founders. Contributors to the volume are Steven Grosby, Jeremiah H. Russell, Maura Jane Farrelly, Daniel Cullen, John Witte, Jr., Scott Yenor, David Ramsey, and Michael Novak. (shrink)

Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)

British systematics was distinctly marked by a raft of vituperative controversies around the turn of the 1830s. After the local collapse of broad consensus in the Linnaean system by 1820, the emergence of new schemes of classification—most notably, the “quinarian” system of William Sharp Macleay—brought with it an unprecedented register of public debate among zoologists in Britain, one which a young Charles Darwin would bitterly describe to his friend John Stevens Henslow in October 1836 as possessing a “mean quarrelsome spirit,” (...) conducted in “a manner anything but like that of gentlemen.” This article aims to provide a social and conceptual account of the remarkable tenor of zoological discourse in Britain in the late 1820s and early 1830s, with joint attention to the philosophical and interpersonal commitments at play. In doing so, it analyzes the three of the period’s most striking public controversies, each of which counted key advocates of the quinarian system as central participants. (shrink)

Commentaries on the target article offer diverse perspectives on integrative experiment design. Our responses engage three themes: (1) Disputes of our characterization of the problem, (2) skepticism toward our proposed solution, and (3) endorsement of the solution, with accompanying discussions of its implementation in existing work and its potential for other domains. Collectively, the commentaries enhance our confidence in the promise and viability of integrative experiment design, while highlighting important considerations about how it is used.

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is (...) at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. Researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm – and with far greater efficiency. (shrink)

That the great Scottish man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) exercised a formative influence over late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ‘British Idealism’ has long been recognized by historians. Through works such as Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), Past and Present (1843), and Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Carlyle transmitted his ideas regarding the immanence of the divine in nature and man, the infinite character of duty, and the ethical role of the state to a generation of subsequent philosophers. The following article (...) will extend this insight, arguing that through the agency of an array of migrant Scottish intellectuals, Carlyle's writings made an equally significant contribution to the development of Idealism in English-speaking Canada. (shrink)

Despite an efflorescence of historical scholarship on the theme of monarchy in nineteenth-century Britain, the views of the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in this regard have been explored only in fragmentary and incomplete fashion. The present article aims to offer a comprehensive survey of Carlyle's thought regarding monarchy, arguing that on the whole, Carlyle was strongly and consistently opposed to monarchy on the hereditary principle, claiming that this had become an absurd anachronism in the modern (...) (democratic) world. Instead, Carlyle strongly and consistently promoted a merit-based aristocracy of talent, in which the ‘best’ man would rule, regardless of heredity or social origin. Indeed, in his historical writings, he was quite prepared to endorse regicide as a means to replacing inept hereditary monarchs with low-born men of destiny such as Oliver Cromwell. Although Carlyle refrained from publicly demanding the abolition of the monarchy in contemporary Britain, his private correspondence and conversation were replete with sneers and snide asides regarding Queen Victoria and her predecessors. (shrink)

With the increasing professionalization of clinical ethics, some hospitals and health systems utilize both ethics committees and professional clinical ethicists to address their ethics needs. Drawing upon historical critiques of ethics committees and their own experiences, the authors argue that, in ethics programs with one or more professional clinical ethicists, ethics committees should be dissolved when they fail to meet minimum standards of effectiveness. The authors outline several criteria for assessing effectiveness, describe the benefits of a model that places primary (...) responsibility for ethics work with professional clinical ethicists—the PCE-primary model, and offer suggestions for alternative ethics program structures that empower healthcare professionals to contribute to ethics work in ways more tailored to their strengths and skills while minimizing the shortcomings of ethics committees. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas holds that we can love others for their own sake, but it is not clear how such love is possible given his commitment to eudaimonism and to the more general principle that all things seek their perfections as their ultimate end. To explain how nonegoistic love is possible on Thomistic grounds, this article examines the good that is the object of the will, and attempts to determine the relation between this good and the good of the self. (...) The author proceeds dialectically, examining first simple solutions and then turning to more complex accounts found in the literature, specifically those of Louis-Bertrand Geiger, Avital Wohlman, and David Gallagher. He argues that the solution is found in the possibility of the good that we will being a common or shared good. Common or shared goods perfect us, but their proper subject, for whom they are principally willed, is something beyond the self. (shrink)

This book is an interpretation of the moral teaching of Thomas Aquinas's Summa of Theology. It argues that teaching on the virtues can only be understood by turning to the patterns of divine teaching in the incarnation and the sacraments. It presents this not only as Thomas's great originality in the Summa but also as his contribution to Christian thought in the present.

Scholastic philosophy is often associated with dialectical reasoning and the consideration of universal theses, in contrast to the variable and practical questions considered by disciplines such as politics and rhetoric. However, while the primacy of dialectical inquiry in Scholastic thought is difficult to deny, the movement also produced advances in rhetorical theory as well. Specifically, I argue that the works of Thomas Aquinas present a view of rhetorical reasoning and deliberation aligned closely with the virtue of prudence and dependent (...) on sensory experience ordered within the memory. Building from an understanding of rhetoric as an intellectual operation dedicated to the consideration of questions about... (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas’s explanation of the (then new) doctrine of sacramental character can seem a crudely mechanical view of the causality of rites of church membership. It explains in fact the capacity and horizon for moral action in salvation history. Participation in the priesthood of Christ enables the believer to inhabit the pedagogy through which history is brought back to Trinitarian life. This sort of account, which is for Thomas the indispensable ground of moral theology, sounds archaic to many (...) contemporary Christian readers who nonetheless want to excerpt from Thomas particular ethical conclusions. They fail to appreciate the challenge posed by change in the deep categories of moral performance—a change nowhere more consequential or invisible than in contemporary debates over sexuality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Love of God above SelfJordan OlverIS THERE ANY LOVE that is not ultimately a form of self-love? Anders Nygren famously maintained that for Thomas Aquinas there is not. Nygren was led to this conclusion in large part by Aquinas’s claims that love is an act of the will and that the ultimate end of the will is happiness: if every act of love is on account of happiness (...) as an ultimate end, it seems to follow that all love of others is motivated by, and reducible to, love of self.1 Others have drawn this conclusion for similar reasons. Scott MacDonald, for example, interprets Aquinas as proposing “egoistic rationalism”; he believes that this ethical position follows from Aquinas’s claim that human beings, like all creatures, seek their perfection.2Texts, however, can be produced to show that Aquinas himself believes that nonegoistic love is possible.3 If he is an [End Page 97] egoist, he is not so intentionally; he can only be so in the sense that his principles, despite his wishes, necessitate such a position. While Nygren interpreted Aquinas as an unwilling egoist of this sort,4 most modern scholars of Aquinas’s thought on love have held that his principles do not necessitate egoism, and they have endeavored to explain how nonegoistic love is possible on Thomistic grounds. Modern attempts to solve the “problem of love in Thomas Aquinas” normally look back to Pierre Rousselot’s 1908 work Pour l’histoire du problème de l’amour au moyen âge.5 Rousselot identified the “problem of love” as whether a love that is not egoistic is possible and, if it is, what the relation might be between this love and the love of self which appears to be the foundation of natural tendencies.6 Rousselot believed that in the Middle Ages this problem was primarily dealt with through the consideration of the more particular problem of whether it is possible to love God above self apart from grace. This approach, he thought, offered significant advantages: it was simultaneously concrete and profound, and the object of love was both the last end and the author of all natural appetites.7 If genuine love for another is possible, that possibility would be discoverable in this case and through analysis of love of God above self it would seem that one could [End Page 98] arrive at the principles needed to make sense of other nonegoistic loves.8 Accordingly, when Rousselot presented Aquinas’s solution to the problem of love, he did so exclusively through an explanation of Aquinas’s teaching on love of God above self.9 The most notable feature of this account was its appeal to the part-whole relation: Rousselot proposed that for Aquinas our love for God above self is due to the fact that we relate to God as a part to a whole.Rousselot’s work inspired a scholarly discussion that has persisted now for over a century. This discussion may be roughly divided into three stages: the early twentieth century, the mid-twentieth century, and the late-twentieth century to the present. General agreement with Rousselot characterizes early twentieth-century scholarship. Scholars of this period, such as Charles-Vincent Héris, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and H.-D. Simonin, may claim that Rousselot neglects or overemphasizes something, but they do not assert that he is substantially wrong.10 By contrast, rejection or neglect of the “part-whole” approach to love of God above self characterizes the scholarship of the mid-twentieth century. Étienne Gilson, in his 1932 work L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, vigorously objects to Rousselot’s account, arguing that the part-whole relationship, as it functions in Aquinas’s arguments for love of God above self, should not be understood in “a distressingly literal way,” but simply as “a metaphor, the first moment in a manuductio.”11 [End Page 99] Louis-Bertrand Geiger also emphatically rejects Rousselot’s account, arguing that the real explanation of disinterested love is to be found in the will’s special, “objective” inclination to the “good in itself” as opposed to the “good for me”; we love God... (shrink)

Arguments that Aquinas’s literal commentaries on Aristotle present his own philosophy are often proxies for larger claims about the relation of philosophy to theology. While trying to secure a place for Thomas in philosophic conversation, such arguments impose modern notions of an autonomous and apodictic philosophy, with fixed genres of declarative speech. The result is neither a plausiblereading of the Thomistic corpus nor a helpful exemplar for contemporary Catholic philosophy.

Many Christian theorists notice that love should contain, in additional to benevolence, some kind of interpersonal or unitive component. The difficulty comes in trying to provide an account of this unitive component that is sufficiently interpersonal in other-love and yet is also compatible with self-love. Eleonore Stump is one of the few Christian theorists who directly addresses this issue. Building upon the work of Thomas Aquinas, Stump argues that love is constituted by two desires: the desire for an individual’s (...) good and the desire to be united to that individual. Stump further develops the desire for union within this Thomistic understanding of love, and she maintains that her developed account not only captures the robustly interpersonal nature of one’s love of another but is also compatible with the love of oneself. Unfortunately, Stump’s way of making sense of this latter claim introduces a significant inconsistency in her analyses of the desire for union in self-love and other-love. Nevertheless, the most important features of Stump’s Neo-Thomistic account are salvageable. For there is a way of understanding love’s desire for union that emerges out of Thomas’s views on love and is compatible with the desiderata suggested by Stump, only does not have the same difficulties that beset Stump’s account. What is offered, then, is a modification of Stump’s account that might better serve her purposes. The resulting view of love, however, is one not only relevant to Stump. Rather, the view that emerges is a broadly Thomistic conception of love that is plausible in its own right and captures a certain biblical emphasis on the relational or interpersonal nature of love. (shrink)

In the course of defending the doctrine of universalism (the teaching that God will eventually reconcile all created persons to Himself ), the philosopher of religion Thomas Talbott has defended the logically independent claim that God loves every created person with what might be termed “supreme love”: the love that makes it so that God, without internal conflict and cessation, truly desires and seeks a created person’s supreme or highest good. Talbott’s arguments concerning God’s supreme love for all have (...) received considerably less attention than his arguments for universalism, a regrettable fact given the relative paucity of philosopher literature dealing with the nature and scope of divine love. Therefore, in this paper, I defend not universalism, but develop and defend one of Talbott’s arguments for the universal scope of God’s supreme love. (shrink)

Innere Bilder sind fur das Auge nicht sichtbar, sie sind kein Objekt visueller Wahrnehmung. SIe treten vor das 'geistige Auge'. ZIel des vorliegenden Buches ist die Konzeptualisierung einer Disposition fur innere Bildlichkeit als Erkenntnisorgan neben der Sprache und im Zusammenwirken mit ihr. HErausgestellt wird ein bislang weniger beachtetes menschliches Vermogen, das zunachst als allgemein anthropologische Fahigkeit untersucht wird und in einem zweiten Schritt als spezifisch dichterisches Vermogen. ES stellen sich einige grundsatzliche Fragen: Was sind innere Bilder? Inwiefern sind sie relevant (...) fur unsere Orientierung und fur unseren Zugang zur Welt? Welche Rolle spielen innere Bilder im Hinblick auf Wahrnehmung, Vorstellung und Erkenntnis? Innere Bilder sind erkenntnistheoretisch gesehen eine Herausforderung - sprachliche oder kunstlerische Darstellungsweisen ermoglichen einen Zugang zu ihnen. DIe theoriebildende Arbeit dient im abschlieSSenden Teil des Buches als Instrumentarium fur Studien uber erzahlende Literatur folgender Autoren: E.T.A. HOffmann, Joseph von Eichendorff, Theodor Fontane, Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Thomas Bernhard. (shrink)

Mind and matter.--Moral nerve.--Herbert Spencer as a moralist.--Huxley as a moralist.--Substitutional morals: the principle of punishment.--Literary and scientific verdicts.--The genesis of modern kindliness.--Stuart Mill.--Thomas Carlyle.--The French revolution.--Epoch-making incidents and persons.--The slow change in the fundamental characteristics of peoples and individuals.--Emerson on Napoleon.--Goldwin Smith.--Material prosperity and religion.--Nerve forces as totalities.--The evolution of the direct man (direct brain).

Originally published as _Le Mirage linguistique_, this book remains the definitive study of the role of linguistics in structuralism and poststructuralism. Thomas Pavel examines recent French thought through the work of luminaries such as Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. The "spell of language" for Pavel consists of three things: the promise that linguistics seemed to represent for the humanities and social sciences; the distortions, misunderstandings, and willful neglect incumbent upon the "linguistic turn"; and, above all, the break with traditional (...) humanism. He isolates three modes of thought-moderate structuralism, scientific structuralism, and speculative structuralism-and shows how even as they diverge from each other, they all advocate an antihumanist point of view. In this spirited book, Pavel shows that structuralism's flawed use of linguistic theory has rendered hollow the philosophical core of a whole generation of work in the human sciences. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka derives rights to punish from what I will term the Libertarian Rights Principle, which is “that there is really only one natural right, namely the equal right of all persons to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for other persons, and that all other natural rights are species or instances of the right to liberty.” These rights to punish, he says, extend only to punishing violators of rights, never to “punishing” the innocent; extend only (...) to punishing for violations pursuant to intentions publicly announced prior to these violations; are subject to the “upper limit qualification” that a permissible punishment for the violation of a right cannot be an act that would violate a more important right ; and are subject to the “minimum necessary qualification” that a punishment p for violating a right r is not permissible if a punishment p' that would, were it permitted, violate a less important right than would p, would protect r as effectively as would p. (shrink)

To compose a Christian book on exemplary Christian living, Ambrose appropriates and criticizes Cicero's book on "duties," "De officiis." In many passages within the moral part of his "Summa of Theology," Thomas Aquinas incorporates quotations from both Cicero and Ambrose. Comparison of the three texts raises issues about the relation of genres to terms, arguments, rules, and ideals in religious teaching. Genre becomes a useful category for analyzing religious rhetoric only when it is conceived as a set of persuasive (...) or pedagogical relations below a text's surface disposition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy by John InglisMark D. JordanJohn Inglis. Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, volume 81. Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998. Pp. x + 324. Cloth, $99.50.Modern philosophers have shown themselves quite unphilosophical about the academic history of their own discipline. Content with grand stories that move from Plato to themselves, (...) they have treated institutional histories, recent histories, and bibliographical histories as unworthy of attention. John Inglis sets out to change all that for the study of medieval philosophy. He demonstrates by the book’s end that we have failed to recognize our historiographical procedures as conventions—with very particular histories of their own.The first part of the book traces the genealogy of the dominant (one might say, hegemonic) model in recent studies of medieval philosophy. The genealogy is prefaced with two chapters that show how various were the motives for reconstructions of medieval thought before 1850 in authors such as Billuart, Goudin, and Brucker or Hegel, Ritter, and Hauréau. These chapters might be dismissed by contemporary scholars as so much antiquarianism. There can be no dismissing the relevance to contemporary work of Inglis’s main genealogy, which runs with surprising directness from Joseph Kleutgen (1811–1883) and Albert Stöckl (1823–1895) to Norman Kretzmann and Anthony Kenny.It adds to the piquancy of Inglis’s argument that most specialists in medieval philosophy will not even recognize the names of Kleutgen and Stöckl, much less feel kinship with them. But Inglis shows convincingly what Kleutgen and Stöckl did to make the study of medieval philosophy possible in modern universities. Kleutgen mapped the medieval texts onto a system of “spheres,” of fields or topics, recognizable to professors of philosophy. This means that he necessarily privileged epistemology, as he necessarily connected a medieval thinker’s views across the “spheres” into a system—or a failed attempt at one. Kleutgen then emphasized the reason/revelation dichotomy and an allegiance to what he understood as the system of Thomas Aquinas. Put these elements together and you have a surprisingly familiar story. It remained for Stöckl to write it up as an erudite and monumental narration.Inglis follows this „Kleutgen-Stöckl model” through a number of more familiar authors, including De Wulf, Gilson, Boehner, Weinberg, and the editors of the Cambridge [End Page 530] History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Of course, in reducing the genealogy to a list of famous names I ignore two of its great virtues. The first is the detail with which it retells the institutional circumstances and the forgotten intermediaries of the scholarly tradition. Behind the genealogy, around its borders, there stands Inglis’s enormous effort of original research, much of it archival. The genealogy’s second virtue is the dialectical subtlety with which it locates continuities under contradictions. Gilson is usually touted as the antithesis of De Wulf, and Kretzmann of Gilson. Inglis makes such antitheses seem superficial by comparing them with an abiding if tacit agreement about how medieval texts can be appropriated within modern philosophy. To seal the comparison, Inglis suggests in the book’s second part what a real antithesis to the Kleutgen-Stöckl model might be. He reconstructs, in his last two chapters, Thomas’s accounts of human knowledge and of theology’s relations to philosophy in opposition to that model’s prescriptions.No review can represent—or even adequately praise—the enormous learnedness of this book. Moreover, since the book already discusses so much, it must seem ungrateful to suggest that it ought to discuss anything else. Let me end then rather by posing two questions beyond the book’s end. First, does Inglis’s genealogy mean to suggest that the Kleutgen-Stöckl model is now chiefly received in English-speaking philosophy departments? I wonder, for example, how far Inglis might judge Alain de Libera’s Penser au Moyen Age (Paris: Éds. de Seuil, 1991) an alternative to that model. Certainly de Libera shows more self-consciousness about the culturally determined history behind our historiography. His emphasis on the thirteenth-century recovery... (shrink)

How far is Thomas Aquinas available for current discussions in political philosophy? While there are certainly things to be learned from him about our political preoccupations, the pedagogy of his moral teaching typically resists our familiar questions. This holds even when the question is put in terms that Thomas should recognize—say, as a question about the virtues appropriate for a democracy. Thomas not only gives different meanings to these terms, he moves political topics away from the center (...) of theological attention and so organizes them very differently. A reader can notice these differences at many points but perhaps especially in the attention that Thomas gives in the Summa to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. His account of these gifts qualifies significantly what he says of virtue and suggests large limits on human agency, whether in ethics or in politics. (shrink)

In this paper I am concerned with analyzing in detail how ideas and expectations regarding the role of time in quantum theory arose and evolved in the early years of quantum mechanics. The general theme is that expectations which seemed reasonable from the point of view of matrix mechanics and Dirac's q-number formalism became implausible in light of Dirac-Jordan transformation theory, and were dashed by von Neumann's Hilbert space formalism which came to replace it. Nonetheless, I will identify two (...) concerns that remain relevant today, and which blunt the force of Hilgevoord's claim that the demand that time feature as an observable arose as the result of a simple conceptual error. (shrink)

In light of the many recent criticisms of Henry Shue's philosophy, this article provides a defense of Shue's philosophical argument for basic rights. The author demonstrates that the latest criticisms made by Thomas Pogge, Michael Payne, and Andrew Cohen misconstrue Shue's position, and therefore fail to overturn the soundness of Shue's argument. Against those who contend that basic rights demand too much, both logically and morally, the author argues that basic rights serve as the minimal threshold for human dignity (...) and the foundation for all other rights. Consequentially, the overall moral landscape is skewed if basic rights are absent. (shrink)

The first defenses of Aquinas's doctrine after his death, particularly those five polemical works known as the correctoria, are usually read as illustrations of the intellectual forces of the late thirteenth century. The correctoria are used to show the struggle between “Augustinianism” and “Aristotelianism,” between Franciscans and Dominicans, between anti-Thomists and Thomists. It is true that they are anti-Augustinian, after a fashion. They come from Dominican hands, and they defend Thomas. But it is important to see why they reject (...) the views of the self-proclaimed Augustinians and which Thomism they defend. Beyond any question of partisanship, the correctoria deserve to be read as original works of speculative self-consciousness. The Augustinianism they contest is one of philosophical literalism in method and doctrine; the Thomism they defend is one of analogical plurality and methodological restraint. The authors of the correctoria speak substantively about what Thomas achieved for the method of philosophical discourse and say pointedly why it is that his achievement offends their adversaries. (shrink)

Jeff Jordan has recently challenged the idea, widely accepted among theistic philosophers, that “God’s love must be maximally extended and equally intense.” By way of a response, I suggest a way to sidestep Jordan’s argument entirely and then try to show that his own argument is multiply flawed. I thus conclude that his challenge is unsuccessful.

Remarks on Interpretation, Confirmation and Progressiveness of Early Matrix Mechanics. Our note discusses a case study in view of questions of theory-choice. We examine the extent to which the first 'complete, consistent exposition' of matrix mechanics in 1925 can be claimed to be reasonably confirmed, well interpreted and fruitful. Various strategies, by means of deductions and otherwise, by Born, Jordan and Heisenberg to establish these claims are critically assessed. It is shown that the outcome of the Bothe-Geiger experiment does (...) not represent a 'direct' confirmation of the theory. Finally we pose the question of progressiveness and argue for a low over-all 'problem-solving effectiveness'. (shrink)