This article is an analysis and critique of emergent theologies, focusing on areas of Christology and pneumatology. An increasing number of Christian theologians are integrating emergence theory into their work. I argue that, despite the range of theological commitments and methodological approaches represented by these scholars, each faces similar problematic tendencies when their Christian doctrines are combined with emergence theory. It is concluded that the basic logic of emergence theory, whereby matter is seen to precede mind, (...) makes it difficult for emergent theologies to offer an account of salvation, avoid significant issues regarding God's involvement with evil, and maintain divine transcendence. It is concluded, therefore, that Christian theology should look elsewhere for a complementary metaphysical framework with which to bridge scientific and theological discourse. (shrink)

Emergent antireductionism in biological sciences states that even though all living cells and organisms are composed of molecules, molecular wholes are characterized by emergent properties that can only be understood from the perspective of cellular and organismal levels of composition. Thus, an emergence claim (molecular wholes are characterized by emergent properties) is thought to support a form of antireductionism (properties of higher-level molecular wholes can only be understood by taking into account concepts, theories and explanations dealing with higher-level entities). (...) I argue that this argument is flawed: even if molecular wholes are characterized by emergent properties and even if many successful explanations in biology are not molecular, there is no entailment between the two claims. (shrink)

Social emergence is one the most important problems in social science that the way it is answered affects the results of social studies and policies. The complexity of social emergence conception has caused a variety of definitions. This article seeks to define the robust social emergence conditions, using the philosophy of mind conception such as subvenience, wildly disjunctives, and multiple realization. Different approaches have different challenges in satisfying robust social emergence conditions. These challenges could be formulated (...) in three problems i.e. realism, top-down causality, and mechanism. This article aims to analytically criticize how critical realism approaches these problems. Critics believe that critical realism faces two sort of difficulties in satisfying robust social emergence: the first, the independence of structure from agencies that leads to reifying and the second, that ontological and causal emergence conflicts with subvenience. It seems the first problem could be resolved by employing the unrestricted mereological composition conception, and the second by the fact that subvenience do not necessitate ontological dependence. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim, in “‘Supervenient and Yet Not Deducible’: Is There a Coherent Concept of Ontological Emergence?” (2009), attempts to show that C.D. Broad’s conception of metaphysical emergence is incoherent. I argue that Kim’s attempt fails because he fails to recognize that trans-ordinal laws, in Broad’s sense, are supposed to be ontologically fundamental laws. Broad’s conception of metaphysical emergence is coherent, though it is another issue (one I do not address here) whether anything in fact answers to it.

This article presents a critique of Paulo Freire's philosophical perspective on human nature in the context of a doctoral research study to explore “muchness” or nurses’ subjective experience of well‐being; and demonstrates how this critique has informed the refinement of the theoretical principles used to inform research methodology and methods. Engaging in philosophical groundwork is essential for research coherence and integrity. Through this groundwork, largely informed by Freire's critical pedagogy and his ideas on humanization, I recognized the need (...) to clarify my understanding of the concepts of persons and personhood and how this related to Freire's use of the term human beings. This clarification process is essential to ensure congruence between the theoretical principles that I draw from his work and my beliefs about persons, personhood and person‐centredness. The article begins with a brief introduction to the research, followed by an overview of Freire's philosophical perspectives, and subsequently, the critique process is presented and discussed. This process involved engaging with the vast literature and debates about what it means to be a person, to make sense of the often complex and contradictory arguments. Eventually, three headings emerged that helped me to frame my evolving understanding: Our species: human beings; The kind that we are: human nature; and This person that I am: personhood. Through this process of exploration, I recognized that Freire's perspective on human nature (a) foregrounded cognitive rationality, which presented itself as a limitation when considering my ontological beliefs and the focus of my research, leading me to draw on the work of Mark Johnson and his ideas about embodiment to help me to further develop my theoretical principles; (b) focused on the “collective” rather than individuals, which is a shortcoming in relation to person‐centred research that acknowledges the uniqueness of participants. (shrink)

The emergentist position that R. Keith Sawyer has formulated, nonreductive individualism, contains three propositions. First, that social characteristics must always be realized in individuals; second, that it is nevertheless possible to understand social properties as irreducible; and third, that therefore it is possible to demonstrate how social properties are able to exercise independent causal influences on individuals and their properties. It is demonstrated that Sawyer is not able to meet an objection that Kim has formulated against the analogous position in (...) the philosophy of mind. In his defense of the claim of irreducibility Sawyer refers to Fodor’s argument about multiple realizability, but this line of argument cannot preserve the claim for downward causation because Fodor’s claim for irreducibility rests on assumptions that are not compatible with a systematic formulation of downward causation. The article proposes a reading of Fodor’s argument that is consistent with individualism but not with nonreductive individualism. (shrink)

In a recent critique of the doctrine of emergentism championed by its classic advocates up to C. D. Broad, Jaegwon Kim (Philosophical Studies 63:31–47, 1999) challenges their view about its applicability to the sciences and proposes a new account of how the opposing notion of reduction should be understood. Kim is critical of the classic conception advanced by Nagel and uses his new account in his criticism of emergentism. I question his claims about the successful reduction achieved in the (...) sciences and argue that his new account has not improved on Nagel’s and that the critique of emergentism he bases on it is question-begging in important respects. (shrink)

This essay investigates a strand of left-republicanism that emerged in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The solidarists developed a distinctive theory of social property and a thorough critique of the liberal, republican, and socialist alternatives. Solidarism rests on the claim that the modern division of labor creates a social product that does not naturally belong to the individuals who control it as their private property; property, therefore, should be conceived as “common wealth,” divided into individual (...) and public shares. When the wealthy appropriate a disproportionate share, they have a quasi-contractual debt to society that they are obliged to repay. The concepts of social debt, common-wealth, reparations, and rent (“unearned increment”) played an important role in legitimizing egalitarian policies, but they have been largely forgotten today. This article resuscitates the theoretical arguments introduced by the solidarists and explains their relevance for contemporary debates about alternative economic arrangements. (shrink)

This book is a discussion of Heidegger's, Sartre's and Marcel's rejection of Cartesian epistemology, the scepticism to which it leads and its objectivist conception of human existence. It compares this rejection with Wittgenstein's rejection of these conceptions of man, his relation to the knowledge of what belongs to the world in which he lives. It concentrates on the existentialist critiques of consciousness as a substance and of the self as such a substance, of each person's body as something external to (...) which he is causally related, and of others as at best indirectly accessible to us. It discusses Sartre's positive views on these questions and the way he falls into a form of solipsism himself. It then considers Sartre's rejection of determinism and his conception of freedom as our capacity for choice. In a concluding chapter the book sketches a non-objectivist account of the self, its development, its 'bad faith', its capacity to emerge from it, and its knowledge of itself, free from the objections considered earlier. It then considers some new objections directed at its own account. Contents: Man in the World; Man's Way of Being: Existential Dualism; The Personal Dimension: Emotions and Value Judgements; Sartre and our Identity as Individuals; Mind and Body: Rejection of Cartesian Dualism; Sartre on the Self and the Other: Rejection of Cartesian Solipsism; Human Separateness and the Possibility of Communion: Marcel's Rejection of Sartrean Solipsism; Sartre: Freedom as Something to which Man is Condemned; Self, Self-Knowledge and Self-Change: A Non-Objectivist View and its Defense. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas has emerged as a sharp, and occasionally harsh, critic of the Bush administration’s policies since the Iraq war. Habermas has developed this critique in several of his short pieces and interviews, some of which are available in fine collections in both English and other languages. However, the occasional and journalistic character of Habermas’ political interventions often hide the theoretical basis of his critique. In this paper, I argue that Habermas’ critique of the Bush administration’s foreign (...) policy emanates from, and is founded upon, his conception of modernity, and specifically his views about the relationshipbetween “particularity” and “generality.” The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how Habermas’ critique can actually be read as a critique of particularism, which Habermas sees operating behind American (and British) foreign policy, and which, in his view, compromises the key achievements of modernity (especially in its Kantian version.). (shrink)

This book is a discussion of Heidegger's, Sartre's and Marcel's rejection of Cartesian epistemology, the scepticism to which it leads and its objectivist conception of human existence. It compares this rejection with Wittgenstein's rejection of these conceptions of man, his relation to the knowledge of what belongs to the world in which he lives. It concentrates on the existentialist critiques of consciousness as a substance and of the self as such a substance, of each person's body as something external to (...) which he is causally related, and of others as at best indirectly accessible to us. It discusses Sartre's positive views on these questions and the way he falls into a form of solipsism himself. It then considers Sartre's rejection of determinism and his conception of freedom as our capacity for choice. In a concluding chapter the book sketches a non-objectivist account of the self, its development, its 'bad faith', its capacity to emerge from it, and its knowledge of itself, free from the objections considered earlier. It then considers some new objections directed at its own account. Contents: Man in the World; Man's Way of Being: Existential Dualism; The Personal Dimension: Emotions and Value Judgements; Sartre and our Identity as Individuals; Mind and Body: Rejection of Cartesian Dualism; Sartre on the Self and the Other: Rejection of Cartesian Solipsism; Human Separateness and the Possibility of Communion: Marcel's Rejection of Sartrean Solipsism; Sartre: Freedom as Something to which Man is Condemned; Self, Self-Knowledge and Self-Change: A Non-Objectivist View and its Defense. (shrink)

The main objective of this article is to provide a critique of the pandemic strategy suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO) and implemented by various countries from March 2020 onwards in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. Based on the theories of Michel Foucault, this critique aims to show that, in the first instance, the pandemic may be understood in terms of the art of governing human beings at the point of interaction between politics (...) and medicine; secondly, in Foucauldian terminology, such interaction may be referred to as ‘noso-politics’, that is, a mechanism used to control the body of the population via authoritarian measures exercised in the name of the health of the population; thirdly, such a mechanism exercises its power by invoking a mechanistic truth about the SARS-CoV-2 virus which may be countered by an argument that takes a historical perspective on the virus; fourthly, the pandemic strategy may be opposed by a syndemic approach that takes into account interactions between emerging diseases such as COVID-19 and non-communicable illnesses, as well as the biological and socio-economic conditions that the well-being of the population depends on. In short, by providing a critique of the politics of truth about the pandemic, the virus, and health measures, the article aims to encourage a critical attitude that will challenge both the authorities and the truth they invoke to prevent the pandemic strategy being used as a mechanism for governing, given the predictions of the recurrent emergence of new viruses. (shrink)

Urban contexts are widely conceived as inherently violent due to their putatively disorderly nature. Such a conception of violence effectively conceives it as singular and fundamentally destructive, neither of which necessarily hold universally true. Drawing on Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ and the life history of Bismarck, a former gang member turned drug dealer turned property entrepreneur living in a poor neighbourhood in Managua, Nicaragua, this article highlights how different forms of urban violence interrelate with each other over time, and (...) how they shape an individual’s urban experience and environment. In doing so, it underscores how urban violence is not a singular phenomenon, how it intertwines with a range of urban social processes, and how it is often socially constitutive rather than destructive. Seen from this perspective, the key question to ask is less to what extent violence is a hallmark of urban contexts but rather how different articulations of violence emerge in cities, and why it is that they can play such contrasting roles in the constitution of urban life. (shrink)

This article attempts to historically reconstruct the phenomenological critique of psychoanalysis in order to establish a new framework of understanding psychoanalytic theory and practice, given the need for a new phenomenological justification of psychoanalysis as a special intersubjective experience of the analyst-analysand interaction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of phenomenologically oriented psy- chotherapies emerged within Western psychiatry. All of them were more or less influenced or exist in polemics with psychoanalytic teaching and relied primarily on (...) phenomenology in its broadest sense. First of all, we should mention such eminent psychiatrists as Eugene Minkowski, who created the original project of phenomenological existential psychopathology, and also Ludwig Binswanger with his existential, or Dasein-analytical anthropology. All these attempts in one way or another correspond to the general attitude of phenomenology to the critique of psychologism, and ultimately to naturalism of any kind. Therefore, their critique of psychoanalysis is primarily destructive, and psychoanalysis itself serves as one of the distinct examples of naturalistic reductionism of the highest type. These all leads to the rejection of psychoanalytic theory and practice as scientific, that is, one that is based on the Newtonian and Cartesian mechanistic conception of nature, and therefore makes any anthropology impossible. That is why all the mentioned phenomenological projects of psychotherapy at one time or another positioned themselves as projects of philosophical anthropology in a therapeutic perspective. The latest attempts at the phenomenological discovery of psychoanalysis can be seen as the rehabilitation of Kronfeld’s guidelines for the phenomenological justification of psychoanalytic experience. (shrink)

This article critically examines the emergent phenomena of AI-generated and NFT art through the lens of Georg Lukács’ theory of reification and its existential implications. Lukács argued that under capitalism, social relations and human experiences are transformed into objective, quantifiable commodities, leading to a fragmented and alienated consciousness. Applying this framework to AI and NFT art, these technologies can be said to represent extreme examples of the reification of art and creativity in the digital age. AI art generators reduce artistic (...) production to abstract, computable properties divorced from lived experience, while NFTs transform digital art into speculative commodities, imposing the logic of private property and exchange value onto the previously open domain of online culture. The existential dimension of this reification is explored, raising questions about the nature of creativity, originality, and the value of art in an increasingly financialized and automated world. The article suggests that a Lukácsian critique must not only diagnose the reified character of these cultural forms but also identify their potential for resistance and transformation, pointing toward a re-humanized and emancipatory vision of art in the digital age. Contemporary theorists such as Tiziana Terranova, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Benjamin Noys are invoked to further elucidate these issues. (shrink)

What are we to make of Western Buddhism? Glenn Wallis argues that in aligning their tradition with the contemporary self-help industry, Western Buddhists evade the consequences of Buddhist thought. This book shows that with concepts such as vanishing, nihility, extinction, contingency, and no-self, Buddhism, like all potent systems of thought, articulates a notion of the "real." Raw, unflinching acceptance of this real is held by Buddhism to be at the very core of human "awakening." Yet these preeminent human truths are (...) universally shored up against in contemporary Buddhist practice, which contradicts the very heart of Buddhism. The author's critique of Western Buddhism is threefold. It is immanent, in emerging out of Buddhist thought but taking it beyond what it itself publicly concedes; negative, in employing the "democratizing" deconstructive methods of François Laruelle's non-philosophy; and re-descriptive, in applying Laruelle's concept of philofiction. Through applying resources of Continental philosophy to Western Buddhism, A Critique of Western Buddhism suggests a possible practice for our time, an "anthropotechnic", or religion transposed from its seductive, but misguiding, idealist haven. (shrink)

This book draws the limits of our thoughts and consciousness between the mind and mind-independent reality by using mathematical logic with the support of neurology. The author combines the Analytical and Continental traditions with each other's virtues. If Kant were alive today, he would have had to write such a book. Diagnosing the limits between immanence and transcendence of the consciousness depends on defining some transcendental a priori categories in between as some basic axioms of the mind. Although this is (...) a paradoxical attempt every philosopher falls into, the author non-paradoxically identifies these non-intentional cognitive categories by using mathematical category theory. This basic model of the mind allows us to follow the logical possibilities in between that the mind can set up in its relationship with mind-independence. In this way, the author defines the intentional categories of consciousness by using mathematical set theory and obtains a self-representational higher-order theory of consciousness (SHOT). Finally, he combines the intentional and non-intentional categories with an algebraic topography and obtains a model of the mind. The architectural structure of the mind is the problematic skeleton of philosophy with all its sub-branches as a human aura that can be traced throughout the six Cartesian meditations. The philosophical anthropology depicted eventually emerged as a purely naturalistic, shamanic prototype metaphysics radically different from the monotheistic Western tradition that began with Plato. The reasoning had started from mathematics, but unexpectedly arrived at an archaic metaphysics. This philosophical theory is called "Anthropogonia", after Hesiod's Theogonia. After Anthropogonia, logically, truth-seekers in these ancient, imperial religions must retreat from their historically constructed Platonic realist theology to their shamanic roots. The naturalist architecture of the mind requires such a naturalized doctrine and art. (shrink)

The Thomistic doctrine of the soul as the form of the body has many of the right intentions. It aims to promote a close integration of soul and body, and more broadly of the human person with the overall world of nature. Emergent dualism responds that all creatures possess souls if the biological organism has developed in a way that enables it to be the “emergence base” for a soul. This chapter explains a brief survey of Aquinas's view of (...) the soul, following the exposition of that view by Eleonore Stump. The human soul is different from other subsistent immaterial forms, in that the human soul, unlike an angel, does configure matter. The distinctive nature of the human soul, as contrasted with the souls of animals, makes it plain that humans are not merely animals; rather, they are “rational animals”, with all that implies. (shrink)

The Critique of Practical Reason is traditionally regarded as one of Kant’s central works on practical philosophy. Its structural and stylistic parallels with the Critique of Pure Reason sustain one’s conviction about its fundamental systematic relevance in Kant’s ethics. Nevertheless, the compositional sketch of the system of critical philosophy in the first Critique does not presume any separate critique of reason in its practical use. This inspires to investigate the question of the sense and aim of (...) the critique of practical reason in Kant’s main works of the 1780s. Such an investigation discovers, that the concept of such a critique emerges in Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, which intends to find and to establish the supreme principle of pure morals, to supply its full-value deduction and insofar to present a sufficient introduction to the system of moral metaphysics. It is for the purpose of such a deduction, which demonstrates the normative validity and truth of categorical imperatives, that Kant considers a transition to a critique of practical reason necessary. And yet this transition as well as this critique are presumed to take place within the subject field of the Groundwork itself: the main features of the practical critique of reason as described in the Groundwork III are, according to Kant, sufficient for the purpose of justification of critical morality. If, however, the deduction of the moral law given in Groundwork III should fail, no possible future “progress of metaphysics” could compensate this failure, - because this deduction occurs at the «extreme boundary of all practical philosophy”, beyond which lies the realm of moral faith. Kant scholars consider the concepts of the “fact of pure reason” and the doctrine of the highest derivative good as crucial innovations of the second “Critique”. There are however reasons enough to dispute the question as to whether both doctrines really make for an innovation - and for an advance. (shrink)

We examine the “new comparative economics” as proposed by Djankov et al. (2003) and their use of the concept of an institutional possibilities frontier. While we agree with their general argument that one must consider a variety of institutions and their respective social costs, including legal systems and cultural characteristics, when comparing the performance of different economic systems, we find various complications and difficulties with the framework they propose. We propose that a broader study of clusters of institutions and such (...) newly emerging forms as the new traditional economy may be better suited as ways to approach the study of comparative economics in the era after the breakdown of the old comparison of market capitalism and command socialism that came to an end with the breakup of the Soviet Union. (shrink)

Melancholy and The Critique of Modernity examines the connections between the emergence of modern society and the experience of melancholy. The idea of "sadness without a cause" has played an important part in human self-understanding throughout the development of Western society. But with the emergence of modernity melancholy has become its most pervasive and significant experience. The affinity between melancholy and modernity is examined through a comprehensive re-examination of the writings of Soren Kierkegaard. The whole range of (...) Kierkegaard's work is set in the context of a social and historical theory of melancholy. From this perspective Kierkegaard emerges as the most important, and the most typical, psychologist of the modern era. Melancholy and The Critique of Modernity makes Kierkegaard's rich and insightful writings accessible to a new audience and establishes him as a central figure for contemporary debates on the nature of modernity. (shrink)

This paper examines Heidegger's critique of Husserl in its earliest extant formulation, viz. the lecture courses Ontologie from 1923 and Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung from 1923/4. Commentators frequently ignore these lectures, but I try to show that a study of them can reveal both the extent to which Heidegger remains committed to phenomenological research in something like its Husserlian form, and when and why Heidegger must part with Husserl. More specifically, I claim that Heidegger rightly criticizes Husserl's account (...) of 'equipmental objects', and that he is especially unsatisfied with the terminology in which Husserl presents his phenomenological analyses, not only of 'equipment', but of other types of entities as well. However, it will also emerge that Heidegger's own phenomenological work presupposes the performance of what Husserl calls the 'epoch ', the method of 'bracketing' natural knowledge. In this way, Heidegger's sometimes very severe critique must be understood as an internal critique. (shrink)

The article compares Roland Barthes’s and Juri Lotman’s notions of ‘second-order semiological systems’ [systemes semiologique seconds] and ‘secondary modelling systems’ [вторичные моделирующие системы]. It investigates the shared presuppositions of the two theories and their important divergences from each other, explaining them in terms of the opposite strategic roles that the notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘culture’ play in the work of Barthes and Lotman, respectively. The immersion of secondary modelling systems in culture as a “system of systems” characterized by internal heterogeneity, (...) allows Lotman to evidence their positive creative potential: the result of the tensions arising from cultural systemic plurality and heterogeneity may coincide with the emergence of new, unpredictable meanings in translation. The context of Barthes’s second-order semiological systems is instead provided by highly homogeneous ideological frames that appropriate the signs of the first-order system and make them into forms for significations which confirm, reproduce and transmit previously existing information generated by hegemonic social and cultural discourses. The article shows how these differences resurface and, partially, fade away in the theories of the text that Barthes and Lotman elaborated in the 1970s. The discussion is concluded by some remarks on the possible topicality of Barthes’s and Lotman’s approaches for contemporary semiotics and the humanities in general. (shrink)

A world in crisis -- Living in a world without God -- The end of an era -- A ripple in a field -- Telling our story -- Ecosense -- The webbed self : deconstructing individualism -- The American enterprise -- Current patterns and future prospects.

This article examines why Günther Anders, one of the 20th century’s most formidable critics of technology, deemed a critique of technology necessary at all. I argue that the radical philosophy of industrialism in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Human Beings) and related texts is a response to what Anders’s work presents as inadequacies of traditional Marxism, with its focus on class struggle and property relations. In effect, his critique of technology, which is more attentive to forms (...) of domination emergent with mechanization, would come to supplant classical Marxist thought. The piece concludes with some thoughts about how Anders’s ‘post-Marxist’ perspective provides insights for contemporary Marxism and, in turn, how the latter can throw light on problems in Anders’s philosophy of the machine. (shrink)

This article focuses on performative articulations of critiques of psychiatry, with two forms of demonstration in particular: First, the Mad Pride Parades, which have been held in various German cities since 2013, and second actions by the “Blaue Karawane” in Bremen, a movement that emerged in the 1980s in the wake of the dissolution of a psychiatric clinic. Although they are situated in different temporal and local contexts, both rely on forms of street protest to question the demarcation between ‘normal’ (...) and ‘mad’ and to promote the equal recognition of mental alterity. A detailed examination of the forms of action highlights the importance of carnivalesque celebration, provocation and spectacle for both forms of psychiatric critique. We argue that these forms allow experiencing this critique and, at the same time, make drafts of a different—better—society tangible. To elaborate on these aspects, we draw on queer and gender theoretical considerations as well as on approaches from performance studies. Looking at Mad Pride parades and the Blaue Karawane in their respective contexts reveals similarities in the way in which critique of the exclusion of mental alterity is articulated, but also highlights differences in terms of affectedness, participation and argumentation. (shrink)

Ever since environmental ethics began to emerge as an academic discipline in the early 70’s, critical voices have been raised against what by many has been considered its project, namely to establish the direct moral importance of some non-human, non-sentient, non-conscious natural entities. We can distinguish between two main lines of this critique; one that is practical, or pragmatic (claiming that there are pragmatic reasons – given certain practical, “environmentalist” goals – to avoid this project), and one that is (...) theoretical. Here I am interested in the latter, theoretical critique. This critique has appeared in many different forms, but all versions that I know of suffer from one of three flaws: (1) They apply only to some versions (not the most plausible ones) of the environmental ethics project (or they do not apply to any actual version of it); (2) they are not critiques against this project specifically, but against any normative ethical view (i.e. any view according to which there are moral reasons to do (or refrain from doing) this or that); (3) they simply beg the question against those who defend some version of this project. Among the critiques that suffer from (1) we find, e.g., allegations of misanthropy and “ecofascism” (or more generally, various critiques according to which the environmental ethics project has unacceptable normative implications). Among those that suffer from (2) we find, e.g., the critiques according to which the very notion of intrinsic value is untenable and ought to be abandoned. And among those that suffer from (3) we find, e.g., the critique according to which the central notion of moral importance is not intrinsic value, but moral standing (which is supposed to pertain only to sentient creatures). I give examples of each of these critiques and explain why they fail. My conclusion is that it is very doubtful that a successful critique of the environmental ethics project can be formulated, and that each environmental ethical theory, therefore, should be judged on its own merits. (shrink)

According to Peter Harrison's book The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science modern science came into existence as a result of the emphasis of Protestants on the literal sense of the Scripture, their refusal of the earlier symbolic or allegorical interpretation, and their efforts at fixing the meaning of the biblical text in which each passage was to be ascribed a single and unique meaning. This article tries to summarize the most significant critiques of Harrison's hypothesis and to (...) acknowledge their legitimacy. However, the alternative explanation of the emergence of modern science as a result of disputes over the biblical interpretation and the subsequent discovery of the ambiguous character of the ordinary verbal language is not fully satisfactory either. (shrink)

The inquiry into the nature of archaeology and its theoretical presuppositions leads to unexpected results. The question about its nature is a question about distinctiveness: what is unique about the discipline that sets it apart from the others? The question about theoretical presuppositions relates to the conditions that make this distinctiveness possible: what is the frame of reference within which such uniqueness can best be understood? Unexpected results emerge when one sees archaeological reason emerge as an independent dimension of human (...) reason and become a mode of thought. As such, it affects the way in which we view reality, so that the theoretical presuppositions loom even larger, and require a correspondingly fuller elaboration. (shrink)

This article critiques some Islamic approaches to food ethics and the debate over genetically modified food. Food ethics is a branch of bioethics, and is an emerging field in Islamic bioethics. The article critically analyzes the arguments of the authors who wrote in favor of genetically modified organisms from an Islamic perspective, and those who wrote against GMOs, also from an Islamic perspective. It reveals the theological and the epistemological foundations of the two main approaches. Moreover, it provides an attempt (...) to critique what is perceived as an exclusivist and legalistic trend adopted by some authors. It argues that an alternative approach that acknowledges the priority of reason in ethics and is at the same time rooted in Islamic tradition would be more inclusive and constructive. (shrink)

O autor reexamina a crítica de Derrida à fenomenologia de Husserl de forma a mostrar como a sua coerência estrutural emerge não tanto de uma redução a uma doutrina particular, mas antes das exigências de uma concepção unitária, especificamente impostas pelas determinações epistemológicas e metafísicas da presença. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Desconstrução. Derrida. Fenomenologia. Husserl. Presença. Significado. ABSTRACT – The author reexamines Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology, so as to show how its structural coherency arises not so much from the reduction (...) to a particular doctrine, but rather from the demands of a unitary conception, specifically from the demands imposed by the epistemological and metaphysical determinations of presence. KEY WORDS – Deconstruction. Derrida. Husserl. Meaning. Phenomenology. Presence. (shrink)

It seems hard to imagine a concept more significant to modern thought than critique. Critique involved distancing oneself from religious explanations and theological argumentation and came to represent the essence of secular consciousness's potential to deliver modernity's promise of human progress through rational inquiry and scientific development. Critiques of Theology debunks this common understanding. Based on a novel reading of previously less-discussed writings by Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt, the book shows how the practice (...) of critique emerged out of religious traditions and can, in many ways, be traced back to them. This study points to a persistent misreading of critique and demonstrates that it does not come from outside of religion to build a new world of ideas; on the contrary, it redeploys those already present within its theological constellations. (shrink)

Challenging the common assumption that security is an unquestionable good, Neocleous explores the ways in which security has been used in the service of a vision of social order in which state power and liberal subjectivity become an integral part of human experience. Treating security as a political technology for liberal order-building and engaging with a wide range of thinkers and subject areas - security studies and international political economy; history, law, and political theory; international relations and historical sociology - (...) Neocleous explores the ways in which individuals, classes, and the state have been shaped and ordered according to a logic of security. In so doing, he uncovers the violence that underlies the politics of security, the ideological links between security and emergency powers, and the fetish for security that is dominating modern politics. (shrink)

In this volume, authors Alan Bailey and Dan O'Brien examine the full import of David Hume's arguments and the context of the society in which his work came to fruition. They analyze the nuanced nature of Hume's philosophical discourse and provide an informed look into his position on the possible content and rational justification of religious belief. The authors first detail the pressures and forms of repression that confronted any 18th century thinker wishing to challenge publicly the truth of Christian (...) theism. From there, they offer an overview of Hume's writings on religion, paying particular attention to the inter-relationships between the various works. They show that Hume's writings on religion are best seen as an artfully constructed web of irreligious argument that seeks to push forward a radical outlook, one that only emerges when the attention shifts from the individual sections of the web to its overall structure and context. Even though there is no explicit denial in any of Hume's published writings or private correspondence of the existence of God, the implications of his arguments often seem to point strongly towards atheism. David Hume was one of the leading British critics of Christianity and all forms of religion at a time when public utterances or published writings denying the truth of Christianity were liable to legal prosecution. His philosophical and historical writings offer a sustained and remarkably open critique of religion that is unmatched by any previous author writing in English. Yet, despite Hume's widespread reputation amongst his contemporaries for extreme irreligion, the subtle and measured manner in which he presents his position means that it remains far from clear how radical his views actually were. (shrink)

The desire to formulate a viable treaty framework for women’s rights that will meet the challenges of the sociocultural peculiarities in Africa led to the emergence of the original draft Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Women in the twilight years of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Without doubt, the recent adoption of the African Women’s Protocol by the Assembly of African Heads of State and Government in July 2003 is (...) a welcome development coming at a most opportune time. However, if the African Women’s Protocol is to serve its purposes in an effective way, it is absolutely necessary to articulate the normative and structural modalities that would secure the achievement of its stated ends. It is therefore in the quest for defining the strategic parameters of this new-fangled instrument that I analyze the normative promises as well as notable structural and conceptual limitations inherent in the African Women's Protocol with a view to identifying trajectories for its sustained relevance and viability. I address these concerns against the backdrop of the instrument’s provisions. (shrink)

This article is a discussion of the recently emerging critique of pro‐breastfeeding discourses in academic literature, and what this means for midwives and other professionals who find themselves promoting breastfeeding because of professional expectations or indeed workplace policies. Various strands in the debate are explored, starting with dominant and familiar ‘evidence’ and descriptions of breastfeeding and breastmilk that are carried through to international policies that advocate breast over formula feeding. We then consider evidence predominantly from social science literature that (...) has found some women's experiences of infant feeding to be at variance with the dominant pro‐breastfeeding ideology. We argue that midwives and others delivering maternity care are the means to deliver the policy aspirations contained in the World Health Organization (WHO, 2018) Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative document that makes selective positive claims about breastfeeding without adequately considering its potential drawbacks. We conclude that although the benefits of breastfeeding tend to be exaggerated in promotional material, on balance the weight of evidence still favours breast over formula feeding. We challenge the charge that breastfeeding jeopardises women's financial position by arguing that it is not breastfeeding per se that impacts negatively on women's economic prospects, but rather the way in which society is socially organised. (shrink)

In Walter Benjamin’s pivotal essay “Toward the Critique of Violence,” the state emerges as an originary site of violence, and the police figure as a key institution that makes possible both law-preserving and law-founding violence. I argue that Benjamin offers a unique and clarifying understanding of violence that can help make sense of twenty-first century calls for police and prison abolition. At the same time, Benjamin critiques several leftist attempts to combat state violence—such as the workplace strike and leftist (...) reformism—finding in them a reformulation of the very violence they seek to combat. I argue that many of these critiques could be equally levied at some manifestations of the contemporary abolitionist movement. This paper concludes by distilling some of Benjamin’s insights about the propensity to reflect the violence we attempt to contest into some lessons for contemporary activism and social movements. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically examine Stephen Turner's critique of practice theory in light of recent neurophysiological discoveries regarding the “mirror neuron system” in the pre-frontal mo-tor cortex of humans and other primates. I argue that two of Turner's strongest objections against the sociological version of the practice-theoretical account, the problem of transmission and the problem of sameness, are substantially undermined when examined from the perspective of re-cently systematized accounts of embodied learning and intersubjective action understanding in-spired by these (...) developments. In addition, I show that the practice-theoretical framework out-lined by Pierre Bourdieu in the Logic of Practice and other works is, in contrast to Turner's por-trayal of a confused hodgepodge of logical errors and empirical impossibilities, largely consistent with the latest neurophysiological evidence and as such fundamentally foreshadowed more recent understandings of the neurocognitive foundations of the perception, understanding and structure of the motor schemes productive of action in the world. Also in line with these newer neurosci-entific developments, the practice-theoretical focus on the body as the central matrix generative of tacit understandings and analogical operations responsible for “higher order” systems of classi-fication emerges as the key to solving some of the thorniest problems in the theory of action: eliminating to need to resort to unwarranted “collective object” explanations for the origins of shared presuppositional frameworks. (shrink)

The so-called epistemological turn of the Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition is a hallmark of modern philosophy. The broad family of normativism constitutes one major response to the Cartesian heritage building upon some version of the idea that human knowledge, action and sociality build fundamentally upon some form of social agreement and standards. Representationalism and the Cartesian picture more generally have been challenged by normativists but this paper argues that, even where these challenges by normativism have been taken to heart, our intellectual culture (...) remains fundamentally epistemic in certain problematic senses. Two problems are highlighted: first, normativism remains functionally Cartesian, for human action and sociality appear as processes driven by the shared understandings by competent contributors, and second, normativism is unable to account for forms of human action and sociality other than those occurring in the relatively small worlds of normatively regulated conceptual spaces of mutual access and listening. These points are illustrated by an applied discussion of the blind spots of normativist accounts of the emerging environmental and the on-going economic crises. (shrink)

This article tacks back towards the idealist side of the argument, in a spirited defence of critical humanism against the radical symmetry of ANT. Vandenberghe argues that the critique of reification and the ethics of emancipation require us to go beyond the `flat ontology' of ANT and its intermediate level of sociotechnical networks towards a more stratified view of social reality, which is able to account for the determining effect of broader generative but invisible structures of domination. Reasserting the (...) categorical distinction between the ontological regions inhabited by humans and nonhumans, he develops a critical opposition between the gift economy, which emphasizes qualitative relations of reciprocity between humans and which tends towards the personalization of things, and the commodity economy, which objectifies things as property, promotes the reification of persons, and turns them into strategically operating `humants'. This model is critically applied to ANT by suggesting that its `fetishist' attribution of social power to nonhumans effectively results from a failure to account for the emergent properties of the broader relational and cultural systems in which they are embedded, and which overdetermine the blackboxed object worlds which ANT has described. (shrink)

Michigan Harvest Gathering is a popular and nationally acclaimed antihunger campaign. It represents a state-sponsored partnership among public, private, and nonprofit institutions “to improve conditions for Michigan's citizens in need". This paper reviews the program, and in the process, critically examines its underlying assumptions about the nature of hunger and helping, about those who are hungry, and about the relationship of agriculture to the remediation of hunger throughout the state. It argues that, in keeping with Michigan's corporatist orientation, the program (...) valorizes the agrofood industry at the expense of sustained public welfare. An alternative approach based on the development of greater local food autonomy provides a programmatic contrast to the elaboration of a “helping” industry designed to deliver emergency food assistance. (shrink)

This paper critically discusses three studies about the question of how much morality may demand of moral agents. These studies may together constitute the most prominent literature about this question to emerge in recent years. In reverse order, they are: Garrett Cullity’s The Moral Demands of Affluence , Tim Mulgan’s The Demands of Consequentialism , and Liam Murphy’s Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory . The paper’s first part very briefly presents the position that these studies defend, and in addition it (...) is argued that all three studies risk denying, for unconvincing reasons, an intuitively very plausible statement, namely that moral agents morally ought to do great good whenever they can do so at little cost to themselves. The second part of the paper then considers the critical position that the three mentioned books take towards an ‘appeal to cost to the moral agent’. Such an appeal, the details of which will be discussed in the paper, has often been prominent in arguments for limiting the demands made on moral agents. I argue that the doubts that the threestudies have about this appeal, are unwarranted. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, applied ethics has turned increasingly toward theories that explore ethical questions faced by a variety of professions and away from classic moral concerns. Abraham Edel, Elizabeth Flower, and Finbarr O'Connor utilize examples of professional, public policy, and personal decision making to illustrate the strengths and limitations of the application of ethics in a rapidly changing world. They first discuss the emergence of applied ethics and how it functions within a philosophical tradition. They are not (...) concerned, however, with solving the problems they expose, but with employing them as a means to critique applied ethics. Using human rights and health and welfare issues, the authors examine the subsequent ethical stumbling blocks that surround the "moral order" of these social concerns. Through a historical discussion of the abundant ethical theories posited since the Enlightenment, they suggest ways to decide which can serve as intellectual tools for applied ethics and consider how knowledge and experience enter into any moral decision. Turning to the factors pertinent in the analysis and solution of moral problems, they dissect the underlying influences on the practice of ethics, the way in which a moral problem is diagnosed and its relevant contexts established, the ensuing conflicts between the concerns of the individual and of society, and the degree of inventiveness in issues of morality. The authors suggest that, instead of viewing theory as a set consequence derived from prior applications, relating theory to practice will engage a process of mutual aid, from which each element will learn, refining and improving the other. Author note: Abraham Edel is Research Professor, University of Pennsylvania, and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, City University of New York. Elizabeth Flower is Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania. Finbarr O'Connor is Professor of Philosophy, Beaver College. The three collaboratively edited Morality, Philosophy, and Practice: Historical and Contemporary Readings and Studies. (shrink)