This article rereads the aporia in Freud's theory of mourning as a problem for representation and aesthetics. Drawing a parallel with Kant's account of the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgement, I argue that the mourner's stubborn willingness to persist in the reproduction of images of the lost object, in spite of their conscious knowledge of the irreversibility of the loss, wrests a minimal zone of autonomy from the sphere of practical interests. In dialogue with Adorno and Laplanche, I conclude by (...) arguing that Freud's inability to adequately explain the problem of mourning is less a shortcoming of his theory of libidinal economy than it is proof of the enigmaticalness of mourning itself. (shrink)

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility is an edited collection of new essays by an internationally recognized line-up of contributors. It is aimed at readers who wish to explore the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

Philosophical tradition demands rational reflection as a condition for genuine moral acts. But the grounds for that requirement are untenable, and when the requirement is dropped morality comes into clearer view as a naturally developing phenomenon that is not confined to human beings and does not require higher-level rational reflective processes. Rational consideration of rules and duties can enhance and extend moral behavior, but rationality is not necessary for morality and (contrary to the Kantian tradition represented by Thomas Nagel) (...) morality cannot transcend its biological roots. Recognizing this helps forge a complementary rather than competitive relation between feminist care-based ethics and rationalistic duty-based ethics. (shrink)

Because Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a well-connected gentleman scientist with substantial private means, the importance of the role he played in the professionalization of the Victorian life-sciences has been considered anomalous. In contrast to the X-clubbers, he did not seem to have any personal need for the reforms his Darwinist colleagues were advocating. Nor for making common cause with individuals haling from social strata clearly inferior to his own. However, in this paper I argue that Galton quite realistically discerned in (...) the reforming endeavors of the 1860s, and beyond, the potential for considerably enhancing his own reputation and standing within both the scientific community and the broader Victorian culture. In addition, his professionalizing aspirations, and those of his reformist allies, were fully concordant with the interests, ambitions and perceived opportunities of his elite social group during the Victorian period. Professionalization appealed to gentlemen of Galton's status and financial security as much as it did to the likes of Thomas Huxley and John Tyndall, primarily because it promised to confer on the whole scientific enterprise an unprecedented level of social prestige. (shrink)

Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

This introductory chapter discusses the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications--including the debate between Saul Smilansky's "illusionism," Thomas Nadelhoffer's "disillusionism," Shaun Nichols' "anti-revolution," and the "optimistic skepticism" of Derk Pereboom, Bruce Waller, Tamler Sommers, and others.

This paper applies a hybrid Heideggerian-ethnomethodological approach to physiotherapy practice. Unlike previous studies written by and for practitioners, this paper uses my personal experience receiving physical therapy as its point of departure. By combining Heidegger’s [Being and time (trans: Stambaugh J). State University of New York Press, New York 1996] notion of the ‘ontological difference’ with Garfinkel’s (Studies in ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs 1967) concept of ‘accountability,’ I argue that in physical therapy practice, both client and practitioner actively shape the (...) body into a coherent object for medical intervention. I begin by introducing three key phenomenological concepts, the life-world, the ontological difference, and Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity. I then empirically substantiate these concepts by reviewing classic and recent studies in ethnomethodology. I conclude with my own experience of physical therapy, and demonstrate how both client and practitioner actively constitute the body as a medical and therapeutic object. This is cause for both disability studies and physiotherapy to reconsider some of their core concepts, ‘medicalization’ and ‘client-specific measurement,’ respectively. (shrink)

This essay considers Brian Leiter’s arguments for ‘replacement naturalism’ in the domain of adjudication, his thesis being that we should reject as plausible the ‘normative theory of adjudication’ and replace it witha posterioritheory which best explains the causes of judicial decisions. My central claim is that his ‘naturalizing’ argument is incomplete in the following way: it is against a bad kind of philosophical theory and leaves scope for a better, non-naturalistic, account. Both Leiter’s original arguments for the position and his (...) more recent suggestions in response to critics are considered. (shrink)

This book describes and proposes an unusual integrative approach to human perception that qualifies as both an ecological and a phenomenological approach at the same time. Thomas Natsoulas shows us how our consciousness - in three of six senses of the word that the book identifies - is involved in our activity of perceiving the one and only world that exists, which includes oneself as a proper part of it, and that all of us share together with the rest (...) of life on earth. He makes the case that our stream of consciousness - in the original Jamesian sense minus his mental/physical dualism - provides us with firsthand contact with the world, as opposed to our having such contact instead with theorist-posited items such as inner mental representations, internal pictures, or sense-image models, pure figments and virtual objects, none of which can have effects on our sensory receptors. (shrink)

Although normative systems, or social laws, have proved to be a highly influential approach to coordination in multi-agent systems, the issue of compliance to such normative systems remains problematic. In all real systems, it is possible that some members of an agent population will not comply with the rules of a normative system, even if it is in their interests to do so. It is therefore important to consider the extent to which a normative system is robust, i.e., the extent (...) to which it remains effective even if some agents do not comply with it. We formalise and investigate three different notions of robustness and related decision problems. We begin by considering sets of agents whose compliance is necessary and/or sufficient to guarantee the effectiveness of a normative system; we then consider quantitative approaches to robustness, where we try to identify the proportion of an agent population that must comply in order to ensure success; and finally, we consider a more general approach, where we characterise the compliance conditions required for success as a logical formula. We furthermore introduce a logic for specifying properties of norm compliance in general and norm robustness in particular. (shrink)

Nous remercions chaleureusement Thomas Golsenne de nous avoir autorisé à reproduire le texte ci-dessous PM – Cette conférence a été présentée au Centre d'art contemporain du Parc Saint-Léger à Pougues-les-eaux le 4 avril 2017, en marge de l'exposition de Florentine Lamarche et Alexandre Ovize, Les motifs sauvages. Que sa directrice, Catherine Pavlovic, soit chaleureusement remerciée de son invitation. Florentine Lamarche et Alexandre Ovize, L'Artichaut, 2015 Dans leurs gros vases - Esthétique – Nouvel article.

Reprinted by permission of Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Carus Publishing Company, Chicago, IL, from Sartre’s two ethics: from authenticity to integral humanity by Anderson, Thomas C., copyright © 1993 by Open Court Publishing Company.

The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce.

Volume 20, Issue 9, September 2020, Page 60-62.

These 'letters to an undergraduate' were published in 1845, two years after the death of their author, Thomas Whytehead. His outstanding student career at Cambridge suggested that he would remain in academic life, but having been ordained a deacon and then a priest, he volunteered for missionary work, and in 1841 sailed for the southern hemisphere as chaplain to the newly appointed Bishop Selwyn. He became seriously ill on arrival in Australia, and died in New Zealand the following year. (...) This work was created during Whytehead's time as a curate, and later on his travels: he felt strongly that new undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge should have a spiritual and moral guide to life in college as well as a history of university institutions and customs. The letters cover the collegiate system, discipline, rooms, the chapel and hall, the lecture room and library, and the lasting importance of college friends. (shrink)

Foundational in its consideration of being and the transcendentals, the Metaphysics of Aristotle is a dense and difficult work on its own. This volume contains the first half of St. Thomas's commentary on the Metaphysics, beginning with discussing the views of Aristotle's predecessors and moving towards a discussion of being.

This guest column comprises both a review of the English translation of Carlo Ginzburg's book Threads and Traces: True False Fictive and some general comments on the merits and demerits of microhistory as a genre poised between historical writing and fiction. The column is published in the context of two others regarding this latter topic — one by Natalie Zemon Davis, the author of the microhistorical classic The Return of Martin Guerre, and one by Colin Richmond. Davis's column is a (...) response to Keith Thomas's having drawn approving attention to the following remark of J. H. Elliott's: “Something is amiss when the name of Martin Guerre threatens to become better known than that of Martin Luther.” In the present piece, Thomas writes of Ginzburg, a founder of Italian microhistory, that he is more a “European intellectual” than a “mere historian,” the difference being that the former is less interested in history per se than in fields like anthropology, philosophy, and literary theory. Thomas's column expresses doubt about the intellectual restlessness of historians like Ginzburg and about the preparation of microhistorians to write constantly on topics new to them, but it claims as well that Ginzburg's “combination of erudition and piercing intelligence is irresistible.”. (shrink)

Sex and the American Teenager provides an expert's assessment on the controversies over teenagers' sexual development, beliefs, and problems, and schools' methods of coping with such matters. Thomas's book is not only replete with facts about sexual issues in school, it provides case studies that illustrate the specific ways that sex issues arise.

Georg Simmel, as well as being a major philosopher, is one of the founding figures of sociology whose work is comparable in importance to that of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. His writings on money, metropolises, and modernity have inspired generations of thinkers for over a century. In this book, leading expert Thomas Kemple clearly and accessibly introduces Simmel’s sociological and philosophical work, ranging from his masterpiece The Philosophy of Money to his famous essays ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ and (...) ‘Fashion’ and beyond. The author situates his writings within his social and intellectual circles and analyses them in light of current debates surrounding urban sociology and social networks, phenomenology and metaphysics, cultural criticism and the study of everyday life. He brings Simmel’s most famous works into conversation with others that have received less attention, such as his writings on nature, art, religion, and sexuality. Through diagrams, everyday examples, and expositions of the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, and successors, this highly readable book captures the innovative spirit of Simmel’s unique method of thinking about cultural objects and his original style of writing about social life. Commemorating the 100th anniversary of Simmel’s death, it will be the leading guide to Simmel’s thought for generations of students and scholars. (shrink)

The article addresses the question when the advocacy of forgiveness in the wake of political mass violence can be harmful and immoral. It engages with this question primarily by probing the value of different pictures of forgiveness, most importantly Rembrandt’s painting Return of the Prodigal Son and a photograph from post-genocide Rwanda. The critical examination of the value of particular pictures in the advocacy of forgiveness also involves attention to particularly problematic ‘pictures’ (in the sense of notions, imaginaries, representations) of (...) the unforgiving victim, of the choices available to societies responding to a violent past, and of unconditional forgiving. (shrink)

Explore Thomas Paine's political and philosophical ideology in this collection of his most famous works.

This chapter details the life of Thomas Brown, successor to Dugald Stewart in the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University. Brown died unexpectedly at a relatively young age, having published very little. However, his posthumously published lectures were highly acclaimed and very influential, both in Britain and abroad. This chapter investigates the sources of Brown’s thought, including his interest in Erasmus Darwin, and outlines the main features of his philosophical position. It thereby identifies his key importance to the (...) nineteenth-century continuation of a debate between followers of David Hume and Thomas Reid, a debate brought to new prominence by Sir William Hamilton’s attack on Brown in the Edinburgh Review. The chapter also offers some assessment of Brown’s philosophical significance. (shrink)

The coexistence of several interpretations of one theory is considered through the example of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. The problem considered is whether physicists manage to work properly in spite of the several interpretations. The criterion adopted is the possibility of re-using others' works for another research: this is called "fruitfulness of works". It is argued that such a fruitfulness is possible between works made in different quantum interpretations.