Criticisms of analytic philosophy have increased in intensity in the last decade, denouncing specifically its closing in on itself, which results in barrenness and ignorance of real human problems. The thought of C. S. Peirce is proposed as a fruitful way of renewing the analytic tradition and obviating these criticisms. While this paper is largely a reflection on Hilary Putnam’s study of the historical development of analytic philosophy, not only can some of its main roots be traced back to Peirce, (...) but also the recent resurgence of pragmatism can be regarded as a pragmatist renovation of the analytic tradition. Further, Peirce’s thought offers suggestions for tackling some of the most stubborn problems in contemporary philosophy, thereby enabling us to shoulder once more the philosophical responsibility which has been abdicated by much of twentieth-century philosophy. The most accurate understanding of Peirce is to see him as a traditional and systematic philosopher, but one dealing with the modern problems of science truth, and knowledge from a valuable personal experience as a logician and an experimental researcher in the bosom of an interdisciplinary community of scientists and thinkers. (shrink)

Plea bargains are the stock-in-trade of the modern American prosecutor’s office. The basic scenario, wherein a defendant agrees to plea guilty in exchange for a reduced sentence, is familiar to viewers of police procedurals. In an equally famous variation on the theme, the prosecutor requests something more than an admission of guilt: leniency will only be forthcoming if the defendant is willing to cooperate with the prosecutor in securing the conviction of another suspect. In some of these cases, (...) the defendant is a low-level criminal who has information on a high-level malefactor who is of more interest to the police. In others, the defendant and the person she is asked to testify against are of the same criminal rank, but evidentiary weaknesses induce the prosecutor to seek the aid of one suspect in order to convict the other. In this latter version, the classic tactic of film detectives is to offer the bargain to both defendants in the hopes that one will crack and agree to reveal what he knows about the other. The defendants could either be in custody for different crimes or be accomplices in the same offense. -/- The last variation (involving accomplices) is the subject of this Article. I take issue with the prosecutorial tactics in these cases because of the risk they create of punishing the comparatively virtuous person more than the comparatively vicious one for the same acts. As I will argue, it is the less honest person who is more likely to accept the prosecutor’s deal, leading the more honest person, who resisted temptation, to suffer greater penalties. -/- I contend that this scenario offends distributive justice, runs counter to the idea (accepted by some) that a proper goal of the state is the cultivation of good character in the citizenry, and is perverse insofar as a person will suffer more from the prosecutor's dilemma insofar as she is more or less a person of conscience. These negative considerations notwithstanding, I do not call for the abolition of accomplice plea bargaining but argue that the problems I raise should be considered when weighing its pros and cons. -/- This article was published in the company of a strong critical response by Guha Krishnamurthi, whose contribution I greatly appreciate. (shrink)

Human decisions are conditioned by formidable uncertainty. The standard resource for dealing rationally with uncertainty is the mathematical concept of probability. The probability calculus is well-known, but since the numerical demands for applying it cannot usually be met, it is not widely applicable. By contrast, the concept of plausibility is widely applicable, but it is little known. This book relies on a generalized concept of plausibility whose strength is its adaptability. The adaptability is due to a novel form of decision (...) theory that takes plausibilities as inputs. This form of decision theory can be adapted to decisions informed by sharp probabilities and utilities as well as to decisions that must be made without them. The book illustrates its application to problems in argumentation theory, scientific theory choice, risk management, ethics, law, economics, and epistemology. (shrink)

In the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, ways of thinking in the Western world transformed in fundamental ways; even words that remained the same took on new meanings. In the field of the history of ideas, the period 1700–1850 is also called the ‘saddle-period’. Philosophers of history have argued that the new basic concepts that emerged at this time indicate how social reality has come to be comprehended in the modern era. Various segments of the population relied on them (...) to act, understand, interpret and reform reality. These concepts are crucial to the discursive constitution of the world—in the economy, politics, science, art, education and so on. They play their part in the dissolution of the ‘old’ world and the emergence of a ‘new’ one. They can thus also be studied with regard to their functioning as both factors in and indicators of evolutionary processes. This article deals with a small aspect of the historical co-evolution of concepts and structures in education. It examines the non-random character of the variations in the discourses on the social function of education, especially in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A View on the Future of an International Philosophy of Music Education:A Plea for a Comparative StrategyFrede V. NielsenIn the preface to the revised edition of my book, Almen musikdidaktik (The General Didaktik of Music) published in 1998, I wrote that the bibliography had been supplemented with a great deal of music education literature that had been published since the first edition of the book came out in (...) 1994. I drew attention in particular to, among other things, the journal Philosophy of Music Education Review, which began in 1993. I found that publication of this journal was significant and interesting not least because it continuously supplemented the approach to a theoretical and philosophic music pedagogical reflection with new English language literature. At the same time, it provided an opportunity to ask what sort of concepts and phenomena 'the philosophy of music education' and 'the philosophy of music teaching and learning' really are and what sort of functions they can have in relation to practice-oriented music education, including the education of music teachers. Therefore, the publication of PMER was a great step forward. But, like all such steps, it also revealed interesting issues and raised new questions. [End Page 7]In the Scandinavian countries too the research-based and theory-oriented music education literature has grown considerably since the early 1990s. This is the result of local initiatives in individual countries as well as Nordic cooperation in the form of the Nordic Network for Research in Music Education, which was formalized and institutionalized in 1992. The publication of the network's yearbooks, Nordic Research in Music Education–Yearbook, since 1995 is noteworthy in this context. In our part of the world this was another step forward, but one that also raised some challenging questions. In particular it gave rise to the question: What is the structure of the object of study for music education as a science and how can this object of study be delimited appropriately in relation to other disciplines? I think we have moved further toward giving reflected and well-founded answers to these questions, even though the answers are not unambiguous and may create problems in relation to the institutional affiliations of music pedagogy as a theoretical and scientific discipline.My first encounter with the initiators of the PME symposia took place in 2003 when I attended PME-5 in Lake Forest near Chicago. Even though there were participants from a number of different countries, including the Scandinavian countries (but none, for example, from Germany), it was clear that the event was dominated by North Americans. I contributed with a paper that was based on German and Nordic didactic (didactological) theory, which apparently was quite unfamiliar to most of the conference participants. To me this was a reminder of how important it is that a society that calls itself "international" should strive to embrace and include various traditions from several different points of view if it is to live up to the designation "international."The International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME) was formally founded at the symposium in Lake Forest. For the past two years I have enjoyed the honor of being the society's co-chair together with Estelle Jorgensen. As those of you who attended the symposium in 2003 know, I accepted this task only after some hesitation and with some reservations. Since then I have had the opportunity to consider and experience what the task entails.I mentioned that my impression of PME-5 in Lake Forest was that it was dominated by North Americans. This was no wonder, since PME-5 took place in that part of the world. Moreover, the initiative behind the PME symposia originally came from the USA and Canada. Nonetheless, it gave impetus to a broader international orientation when the ISPME was founded two years ago.I come from a Scandinavian country. Scandinavia is a small language area situated in the northernmost region of Europe and has historically been very dependent on external cultural impulses. For centuries these have not least come from continental Europe and this is also true of the fields of education, philosophy, and music culture. The French and... (shrink)

How should automated vehicles (AVs) react in emergency circumstances? Most research projects and scientific literature deal with this question from a moral perspective. In particular, it is customary to treat emergencies involving AVs as instances of moral dilemmas and to use the trolley problem as a framework to address such alleged dilemmas. Some critics have pointed out some shortcomings of this strategy and have urged to focus on mundane traffic situations instead of trolley cases involving AVs. Besides, these authors rightly (...) point out the political nature of the most interesting debates involving AVs. However, in our view, they do not offer an adequate account of the distinction between ethics and politics and still see their proposals as contributions to the ethics of AVs. We argue that many of the interesting questions about how AVs should behave, both in emergency and other situations, are of political, and not moral, nature. This view is based on a conception of politics and political normativity that we have developed elsewhere and that we call “political minimalism.” Additionally, we show that this proposed perspective has significant consequences for the design, management, and regulation of transport systems. (shrink)

This paper deals with the normative dimension of the states of affairs produced by the performance of speech acts (i.e., states of affairs such as commitments, obligations, rights, licenses), and has a twofold aim. First, it points out the inadequacy of Searle’s conventionalist account of both the performance of speech acts and the normativity associated with it, and advocates as an alternative an inferentialist approach along with Bach and Harnish. Second, it suggests that we can account for the normative (...) dimension engendered by speech acts within the inferentialist framework by making the presumption about the interlocutor’s rationality (a notion derived from Grice’s work) fully explicit, and by attending to the set of expectations and constraints that result from it. (shrink)

Introduction Death is an inevitable part of clinical practice and affects, in its very own way, not only next of kin and friends but also the members of the clinical team, in particular physicians and nurses, as those who take care of a patient in the very last moments of his or her life. Nevertheless, in clinical everyday life, it is no matter of course to meet the end of human life not only on a physical but also metaphysical level. (...) Definition of the problem In Western sociocultural contexts, silence is commonly regarded as an adequate expression of respect in the context of death. Considering that time is a more than limited resource in Western healthcare systems, it can, however, be challenging for the clinical team to pause and pay respect to the life that has passed and to generally deal with the unfathomability of human finiteness. Instead, death tends to become drowned out by a strident clinging to the common routines of patient care, in the course of which everyday clinical noises can turn into a roaring, almost inhuman cacophony—a cacophony that may not do justice to the dignity of the deceased, the relatives, or the clinic team. Objective With that said, this article focuses on forms of bidding farewell in clinical patient care, with an emphasis on post-mortem silence. Drawing on examples from literature, medical ethics, and the law, I will plead for a moment of silence in everyday clinical practice as a possible means to interrupt the noise of medicine in the immediate aftermath of death to honor the dignity of both the dead and the living. (shrink)

Suppose you are at the gym trying to see some naked beauties by peeping through a hole in the wall. A policeman happens by, he asks you what you are doing, and you honestly tell him. He then arrests you for voyeurism. Are you guilty? We don’t know yet because there is one more fact to be considered: while you honestly thought that a locker room was on the other side of the wall, it was actually a squash court. Are (...) you guilty now? -/- Probably. You might argue that your scopophiliac ambition was impossible to satisfy given that you were peeping into a squash court, not a locker room. But this “Impossibility Defense” would fail because most jurisdictions follow the very influential Model Penal Code (MPC), which says that what is important about attempt is not the likelihood of success but rather what was going on in your head. You tried to peer into a locker room with the intention of seeing some nudity; that is enough for culpability. The fact that you were mistaken about the location does not exonerate you. -/- But now suppose that the particular jurisdiction you are in does not criminalize voyeurism. While most people think that voyeurism is just plain wrong, if not disgusting, the legislature just never got around to drafting a statute against it. Are you guilty now? The answer is no. But you might just be out of luck and convicted anyway. -/- The reason for this strange conclusion is that most jurisdictions have followed the Model Penal Code in yet another respect: along with the MPC’s “subjectivist” emphasis on what is in your head, they have followed the MPC’s lead in abolishing the Impossibility Defense entirely. As a result, people who believe that they are breaking laws when they really are not may still be subject to arrest, prosecution, and conviction respectively by police, prosecutors, and judges/juries merely if all three parties regard your conduct — especially your trying to violate a law that you mistakenly believed in — as morally reprehensible. The best, if not only, defense against this charge is the Impossibility Defense, but — again — most jurisdictions have decided to make this defense unavailable to defendants. -/- Depriving eligible defendants of the Impossibility Defense is unjust. It violates one of the most basic principles of criminal justice: the legality principle. The legality principle says that there cannot be just punishment without a crime, and there should not be a crime without an explicit law designating it as such. So you cannot be charged with, and convicted of, attempted voyeurism if voyeurism, reprehensible as it may be, was not explicitly prohibited at the time that you made the attempt. -/- If we believe in the legality principle, then we must restore the Impossibility Defense. Without the latter, too many defendants are being — and will continue to be — punished for attempts to perform acts that were not themselves illegal but which various parties in the criminal justice system (except the legislature) thought should be illegal based on their extralegal, moral prejudices. -/- In addition to the MPC, the principal obstacle to resurrecting the Impossibility Defense is a good deal of conceptual confusion that permeates relevant cases and scholarship. Too many courts and academics have conflated “factual impossibility” with “legal impossibility” and have fallaciously inferred “hybrid impossibility” from “hybrid mistakes” (that is, legal mistakes that derive from factual mistakes). One of the principal goals of this Article, then, is to clear up all of this confusion. I will explicate in the simplest possible terms (a) the difference between factual impossibility and legal impossibility, (b) why only legal impossibility qualifies as exculpatory, and (c) why hybrid impossibility simply does not exist. (shrink)

A question at the intersection of scientific modeling and public choice is how to deal with uncertainty about model predictions. This "high-level" uncertainty is necessarily value-laden, and thus must be treated as irreducibly subjective. Nevertheless, formal methods of uncertainty analysis should still be employed for the purpose of clarifying policy debates. I argue that such debates are best informed by models which integrate objective features with subjective ones. This integrated subjectivism is illustrated with a case study from the literature on (...) monetary policy. The paper concludes with some morals for the use of models in determining climate policy. (shrink)

Through a detailed analysis that draws on work across philosophy, the law, and social psychology, this book shows that, from the very beginning of the American criminal legal process in interrogation rooms to its final stages in front of parole boards, testimony is extracted from individuals through processes that are coercive, manipulative, or deceptive. This testimony is then unreasonably regarded as representing the testifiers’ truest or most reliable selves. With chapters ranging from false confessions and eyewitness misidentifications to recantations from (...) victims of sexual violence and expressions of remorse from innocent defendants at sentencing hearings, it is argued that there is a distinctive epistemic wrong being perpetrated against suspects, defendants, witnesses, and victims. This wrong involves brute State power targeting the epistemic agency of its citizens, extracting false testimony that is often life-shattering, and rendering the victims in question complicit in their own undoing. It is concluded that it is only through understanding what it means to respect the epistemic agency of each participant in the criminal legal system that we can truly grasp what justice demands and, in so doing, to reimagine what is possible. (shrink)

Footnotes to Plato. A plea for writing philosophical dialogues This article aims to encourage writing philosophical dialogues. Its main focus is education. Writing philosophical dialogues introduces students to a genre that was once widely practiced. It can teach philosophical skills, such as the ability to put oneself in the position of another. Yet, writing philosophical dialogues is not as common as it used to be and this creates difficulties when teaching students to write such dialogues. In order to deal (...) with these difficulties I first consider reasons for the contemporary scarcity of philosophical dialogues. I then provide possible ways to help students write philosophical dialogues. I show that writing philosophical dialogues today can benefit from working with other disciplines, especially creative writing and it thus has the additional benefit of encouraging reflection on philosophical practices. My argument is based on my own experience of writing (and failing to write) philosophical dialogues and as well as the experience of teaching philosophical dialogue writing to students. (shrink)

This paper deals with the motivation behind Kant’s conception of “religion” as “the recognition of all our duties as divine commands”. It argues that in order to understand this motivation, we must grasp Kant’s conception of radical evil as social in origin, and the response to it as equally social - the creation of a voluntary, universal “ethical community”. Kant's historical model for this community is a religious community (especially the Christian church), though Kant regards traditional churches or religious (...) communities as suitable to their moral vocation only if they undergo Enlightenment reform. The paper concludes with a plea for the Enlightenment view of religion, and an indictment of the common failure to understand it correctly. (shrink)

This article deals with two different but related attempts to reinvent politics as a radical revolutionary act, made by two intellectuals from the former Soviet Bloc, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek and the East German playwright Heiner Müller. I propose to read these reinventions against the foil of Hannah Arendt's passionate plea to rethink politics by breaking with the catastrophic imaginary born in the ruined landscapes of post-fascist Europe.2 Second, I will argue that we need to keep in mind (...) the specific conditions of (post)totalitarian rule in the former Soviet Bloc. Third, and most importantly, these reinventions are haunted by the…. (shrink)

Today professionals have to deal with more uncertainties in their field than before. We live in complex and rapidly changing environments. The British philosopher Ronald Barnett adds the term ‘supercomplexity’ to highlight the fact that ‘we can no longer be sure how even to describe the world that faces us’ (Barnett, 2004). Uncertainty is, nevertheless, not a highly appreciated notion. An obvious response to uncertainty is to reduce it—or even better, to wipe it away. The assumption of this approach is (...) that uncertainty has no advantages. This assumption is, however, not correct as several contemporary authors have argued. Rather than problematising uncertainty, I will investigate the pros and cons of embedding uncertainty in educational practice of professional higher education. In order to thoroughly explore the probabilities and challenges that uncertainty poses in education, I will dwell on the radical ideas on uncertainty of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he recognises two forces: the Apollinian, that is the pursuit of order and coherence, and the Dionysian, that is the human tendency to nullify all systematisation and idealisation. Uncertainty is part of the Dionysian. I will argue that when educators take Nietzsche's plea to make room for the Dionysian to heart, they can better prepare students for an uncertain world. If, and only if, students are encouraged to deploy both tendencies—the Apollinian and the Dionysian—they can become professionals who are able to stand their ground in an uncertain and changing (professional) world. (shrink)

Moral case deliberation is a dialogue among health care professionals about moral issues in practice. A trained facilitator moderates the dialogue, using a conversation method. Often, the facilitator is an ethicist. However, because of the growing interest in MCD and the need to connect MCD to practice, healthcare professionals should also become facilitators themselves. In order to transfer the facilitating expertise to health care professionals, a training program has been developed. This program enables professionals in health care institutions to acquire (...) expertise in dealing with moral questions independent of the expertise of an ethicist. Over the past 10 years, we developed a training program with a specific mix of theory and practice, aiming to foster the right attitude, skills and knowledge of the trainee. The content and the didactics of the training developed in line with the philosophy of MCD: pragmatic hermeneutics, dialogical ethics and Socratic epistemology. Central principles are: ‘learning by doing’, ‘reflection instead of ready made knowledge’, and ‘dialogue on dialogue’. This paper describes the theoretical background and the didactic content of the current training. Furthermore, we present didactic tools which we developed for stimulating active learning. We also go into lessons we learned in developing the training. Next, we provide some preliminary data from evaluation research of the training program by participants. The discussion highlights crucial aspects of educating professionals to become facilitators of MCD. The paper ends with concluding remarks and a plea for more evaluative evidence of the effectiveness and meaning of this training program for doing MCD in institutions. (shrink)

The introduction of new technologies in society is sometimes met with public resistance. Supported by public policy calls for “upstream engagement” and “responsible innovation,” recent years have seen a notable rise in attempts to attune research and innovation processes to societal needs, so that stakeholders’ concerns are taken into account in the design phase of technology. Both within the social sciences and in the ethics of technology, we see many interdisciplinary collaborations being initiated that aim to address tensions between various (...) normative expectations about science and engineering and the actual outcomes. However, despite pleas to integrate social science research into the ethics of technology, effective normative models for assessing technologies are still scarce. Rawls’s wide reflective equilibrium is often mentioned as a promising approach to integrate insights from the social sciences in the normative analysis of concrete cases, but an in-depth discussion of how this would work in practice is still lacking. In this article, we explore to what extent the WRE method can be used in the context of technology development. Using cases in engineering and technology development, we discuss three issues that are currently neglected in the applied ethics literature on WRE. The first issue concerns the operationalization of abstract background theories to moral principles. The second issue concerns the inclusiveness of the method and the demand for openness. The third issue is how to establish whether or not an equilibrium has been reached. These issues should be taken into account when applying the methods to real-world cases involving technological risks. Applying the WRE method in the context of engaged interdisciplinary collaboration requires sensitivity for issues of power and representativeness to properly deal with the dynamics between the technical and normative researchers involved as well as society at large. (shrink)

Two of the articles deal with the Apology and the Crito and another two tie in with the themes of these dialogues by focusing on the questions of rhetoric. R. E. Allen in "Irony and Rhetoric in Plato’s Apology" points out the interrelationship between the Apology and the Gorgias in terms of two forms of rhetoric: "base rhetoric, aiming at gratification... and philosophical rhetoric, aiming at the truth." It is the latter form of rhetoric that Allen suggests Socrates uses before (...) the Athenian judges. Betty Sichel argues along similar grounds in "Is Socrates a Sophist?" where she differentiates Socrates’ use of Sophistic logic and rhetoric from the Sophistic use by focusing on the contrasting content and purposes of the two. W. K. C. Guthrie, in contrast, in "Rhetoric and Philosophy: The Unity of the Phaedrus" disagrees with the above two, instead denying to Socrates any interest in rhetoric and arguing that the Phaedrus must be read "not as has been done in the past as a manual of instruction in rhetoric... but a plea to abandon it for philosophy." A. D. Woozley’s treatment of the Apology and the Crito turns from a discussion of rhetoric to "Socrates and the Law," and offers yet another attempt to wrestle with and find compatible the striking contradictions in these two works concerning obedience to the law. Though Woozley wisely concludes that a definitive answer is impossible, he does proceed with considerable care and insight through the various Socratic arguments. (shrink)

humanism /'hju:menizm/ n. an outlook or system of thought concerned with human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, and Gloria Steinem all declared themselves humanists. What is humanism and why does it matter? Is there any doctrine every humanist must hold? If it rejects religion, what does it offer in its place? Have the twentieth century's crimes against humanity spelled the end for humanism? On Humanism is a timely and powerfully argued philosophical (...) defence of humanism. It is also an impassioned plea that we turn to ourselves, not religion, if we want to answer Socrates' age-old question: what is the best kind of life to lead? Although humanism has much in common with science, Richard Norman shows that it is far from a denial of the more mysterious, fragile side of being human. He deals with big questions such as the environment, Darwinism and 'creation science', euthanasia and abortion, and then argues that it is ultimately through the human capacity for art, literature and the imagination that humanism is a powerful alternative to religious belief. Drawing on a varied range of examples from Aristotle to Primo Levi and the novels of Virginia Woolf and Graham Swift, On Humanism is a lucid and much needed reflection on this much talked about but little understood phenomenon. (shrink)

The problematic issues connected to post-truth communication emerged in all their social relevance after the victory of Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016. Fake news, echo chambers, filter bubbles, and a crisis of experts are some of the phenomena of this epoch of digital revolution that everyone is forced to deal with on daily basis. Public media echoed the plea for a return to a connection between reality, truth, and communication that has been advocated for by philosophy and communication (...) studies since the beginning of the century. However, the strategy for effecting this return is not clear. The paper presents two of the most common strategies employed by practitioners of communication in the newsrooms: reliance on a new form of positivism and the necessity of inculcating critical media literacy into the general population. Concluding that both proposals are inadequate, the paper proposes a rich, relational realism stemming from Peirce’s semiotic and metaphysical studies. (shrink)

Taking the lead from complexity theory and complex systems methodology, the article argues that we are engaged in a contradictory process when encountering, analysing and dealing with complexity. We face opposite tendencies that indicate an in-built dynamic between the increase of complexity and its reduction. The increase partly comes through evolution, defined as the transmission of information and partly from the desire for a human-built world that functions more efficiently. The reduction of complexity is due partly to the necessity of (...) minimizing unwanted and unintended consequences of its increase, and partly due to the continued re-alignment between social systems and their environments. The article examines the public debate about human stem cell research, the debates in the 18th century about the free circulation of commodities and opinions, and the attempts to provide answers to the question debated between Einstein and Freud: why war? The article concludes by arguing that the plea for a re-alignment of scientific disciplines will not suffice. Instead, the study of the co-evolution between science and society offers itself as a strategic research site by focusing on the dynamic interplay between the increase of complexity and its reduction. (shrink)

How is distributive justice possible with respect to immigration if political decisions about entry and membership cannot be grounded in the symmetry of a prior commonality, human or otherwise, that could guarantee reciprocal relations between members and nonmembers? This paper deals with both aspects of this question. Initially, it engages critically with Seyla Benhabib's plea for ‘dialogical universalism,’ showing why the strong discontinuity between political and moral reciprocity precludes understanding distributive justice as the process of mediating between political (...) particularity and moral universality. Subsequently, it suggests that a way out of this conceptual and normative impasse can be found in the fact that boundaries create a double asymmetry. This double asymmetry is constitutive for the ‘dia’ of the political dialogue that separates and joins members and nonmembers. This ‘in between,’ which eludes control by the parties to a dialogue, is the realm of distributive justice. (shrink)

Abstract:Companies have a share in our common responsibility to future generations. Hitherto, this responsibility has been all but neglected in the business ethics literature. This paper intends to make up for that omission. A strong case for our moral responsibility to future generations can be established on the grounds of moral rights theory, utilitarianism and justice theory. The paper analyses two practical cases in environmental policy, in order to come to grips with the complicated ethical issues involved in the responsibility (...) to future generations. The cases deal with the management of finite energy sources and of vulnerable resources of biodiversity. The ethical issues involved in these cases have an important bearing on business ethics: future generations should be included among the stakeholders of the firm. The paper concludes with a plea to institutionalize a “third arena” for debate and deliberation on the protection of the interests of future generations, next to the arenas of the government and the market. Companies should participate in this third arena, led by a participatory ethics. (shrink)

In Section 1, we questioned the evidence for iteration of tenses, even with abstraction. To permit abstraction would in any case risk neutralizing our distinction between tensed and untensed sentences. Sequence of tense phenomena, far from supporting iteration, were incompatible with it. Instead, we argued, tense always retains its full deictic character; tenses never have scope over each other. The future modal WILL is exceptional (Section 2), but abstraction is not required to deal with this.An important suggestion, first made in (...) Section 1 and developed further in Section 3, would restrict quantification induced by the interpretation of Past to a domain determined by pragmatic factors. When Past serves as a reference time, e.g. when it forms part of would, as inSam believed that he would be in BostonJames bought a stamp that would be priceless then a previous occurrence of Past serves to define the domain relevant to the quantificational element of Past. Without semantic binding or reference, the two cases of Past in such sentences will thus be satisfied by the same interval in the past.The extension of this idea in Section 3, permits an account of the supposed incompleteness of the past tense without invoking a hidden THEN in e.g. I turned the lights off. In this case, restriction of the relevant domain does not proceed via an earlier occurrence of Past but depends solely on discourse factors.In Section 4, the analysis of have given in Part I is modified to introduce an element of ‘pastness’. The relevant sub-interval must be non-final-and perhaps need not even be a sub-interval of the evaluation interval itself. Empirically necessary, this change makes the incompatibility of Pres,have and a definite adverb like at 6 o'clock in a single sentence even harder to explain semantically. However, the vague restrictions on domain imposed by the present tense and relevant to the sub-interval required by an embedded have below it seem clearly pragmatically incompatible with the explicit restriction of that same interval to a very specific interval in the past — a restriction which, we argue, is imposed by a definite time adverb.Thus, Part II represents a consistent, though entirely informal plea for the embedding of the semantics of Part I in a framework in which pragmatic considerations can interact freely with the semantics, to restrict the domains within which quantification is permitted. It is in effect a plea for the introduction of partial models along the lines suggested by Barwise and Perry (1981). The advantages of the basic distinctions between tense, aspect and adverbs introduced in Part I would, we have suggested in the second part, be yet more obvious in such a framework. Formalization in a system of partial models must await further work. (shrink)

How is distributive justice possible with respect to immigration if political decisions about entry and membership cannot be grounded in the symmetry of a prior commonality, human or otherwise, that could guarantee reciprocal relations between members and nonmembers? This paper deals with both aspects of this question. Initially, it engages critically with Seyla Benhabib's plea for ‘dialogical universalism,’ showing why the strong discontinuity between political and moral reciprocity precludes understanding distributive justice as the process of mediating between political (...) particularity and moral universality. Subsequently, it suggests that a way out of this conceptual and normative impasse can be found in the fact that boundaries create a double asymmetry. This double asymmetry is constitutive for the ‘dia’ of the political dialogue that separates and joins members and nonmembers. This ‘in between,’ which eludes control by the parties to a dialogue, is the realm of distributive justice. (shrink)

The subject matter of this paper is inexhaustible: it has to do with the nature of the human self. Moreover, it seeks to explore not just one but several of the more distinctive activities of the self: thinking, judging, and responding to the voice of conscience. My plea for so ambitious an undertaking in a single essay is that the self is, after all, endlessly fascinating, profoundly paradoxical, and philosophically as challenging as any object of reflection could be. And (...) the activities I want to examine are so intimately bound up with one another that any attempt to deal with them in isolation seems futile. (shrink)

Introductory: Gombrich's Struggle Against Metaphysics The paper deals with E. H. Gombrich's lifelong polemics against metaphysics in art history and the humanities. They began in 1937 and continued up until his final (posthumous) book The Preference for the Primitives. Analyzing the "fallacies" and "pitfalls" resulting from metaphysical collectivism, essentialism, expressionism, holism and relativism such as a "belief in hypostatized collective personalities" and "style as a super-artist" or "physiognomic fallacy", Gombrich also unmasked their ideological implications. He first targeted nationalism and (...) racialism, then the perils of totalitarianism and finally all forms of relativism. Gombrich's plea for the universality of the "canon of excellence" can be regarded not only as a defence of humanism but also as a form of apology for the values of Western liberal democratic society. (shrink)

Teaching business ethics and corporate social responsibility should neither be misconstrued as a plea for moral rectitude, nor as a limited utilitarian recipe for managing public interest issues or stakeholders — as it too often is. Rather, teaching CSR should allow students to recognize corporations as social institutions so that they can gauge their impact on a social scale and better weigh the values that inform them.However, this vision of CSR training has not found many supporters in North American (...) schools of management, even as the demand for ethics education continues to increase. Our paper endeavours to clarify the bipolar origins of the rising concern around ethics in the business world and how demand for more ethical corporate management is impacting demand for ethics education in management programs. We have noted that despite the intensity of demand, there is a great deal of skepticism and strong resistance to the integration of ethics and social responsibility into the education of management students. Therefore, while providing a preliminary assessment of ethical training in North American schools of management, we raise questions regarding current objectives and those that could be pursued. With these factors in mind, teaching choices that inspired the development of a new course in economic and social ethics can be presented and justified. (shrink)

John Portmann has written a thoughtful and moving meditation on contemporary sexual ethics, particularly respecting the sex of older people. While billed as a book about sex and Alzheimer's, it is far more than that; it is a far-ranging plea to consider the virtue of generosity in all of our sexual dealings and in our attitudes toward those of others.-Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Indiana University.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Directions in Contemporary German AestheticsMatthew PritchardÄsthetisches Denken, 6th ed., by Wolfgang Welsch. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990 (2003), 223 pp.Aisthetik: Vorlesungen Über Ästhetik Als Allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre, by Gernot Böhme. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2001, 199 pp.Ästhetische Korrespondenzen: Denken Im Technischen Raum, by Reinhard Knodt. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994, 166 pp.The relationship between the Anglo-American and German aesthetic traditions is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, acquaintance with one or more figures from (...) the “great tradition” in German aesthetic thought over the last 250 years is a given for most philosophically oriented writers on aesthetics in Britain and America. Thinkers such as Kant or Adorno form a real and abiding part of our background. In some cases the connection with German intellectual lineages goes a good deal further. As an extreme case, take Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic,1 whose engagement with German thought is so deep that I have come across it as a set text for aesthetics courses in German universities (despite the fact that none of the dozen authors Eagleton analyzes are cited in their original language). On the other hand, interest in contemporary German aesthetics in English and American circles appears to be relatively slight. One would have little idea, from reading any of the philosophical journals in English, of just how much activity there is in this area, only a small proportion of which has been translated, cited, or reviewed. And yet the past two decades have seen the publication of dozens of relevant books by German authors, many proposing independent theoretical approaches. Among these—aside from the books reviewed here—are the substantial work done on performance and performativity by Erika Fischer-Lichte (Ästhetik des Performativen, 2004) and Dieter Mersch (Ereignis und Aura, 2002); the theoretical oeuvre of the prize-winning literary critic Karl Heinz Bohrer, of which Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance, originally published in 1981, has made it into English; Ruth Sonderegger’s Romantic-leaning plea Für eine Ästhetik des Spiels (2000); Dieter Heinrich’s work on the philosophy of art and subjectivity, Fixpunkte: Aufsätze [End Page 117] und Essays zur Theorie der Kunst (2003); Martin Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing (2004); the traditional neo-Kantian perspective of the late Rüdiger Bubner as set out in his Ästhetische Erfahrung (1989); Gábor Paál’s Was ist schön?—Ästhetik und Erkenntnis (2003); Konrad Paul Liessmann’s Reiz und Rührung: Über ästhetische Empfindungen (2003)... the list could be continued. And this is not to mention empirical-psychological approaches, works on the history of aesthetics, the reception accorded to analytical aesthetics and American philosophers such as Goodman and Danto, or the continuation of European poststructuralist and Frankfurt School traditions (for example, in the work of Albrecht Wellmer and Christoph Menke).Given this large “backlog” of writing not yet assimilated into Anglo-American discussion, it makes sense to be selective and range a little further than the most recently published texts. Owing to sheer diversity, I cannot honestly claim that the three books I am going to discuss here are “representative” of the interests driving contemporary German aesthetics. But I have chosen them for certain common traits, traditions, and emphases that seem to me to present a stimulating contrast with the approach of Anglo-American philosophical aesthetics, while retaining many points of contact with non-German thought. That the contrast does not come down to the crass standoff of “analytical” vs. “Continental,” and all the clichés about academic style that go with it, should become obvious. It is more interesting than that, and although I want to leave the details to the discussion of the three books, I can mention at the outset a few aspects I regard as important. One is that none of these authors addresses themselves exclusively to either the philosophy of art or to the aesthetics of nature and the environment. Instead they tend to make points relating to both, or to regard both as aspects of a single situation. “Environmental aesthetics” in Anglo-American philosophy—for instance, the work of Allen Carlson—is not only of recent date but is still a subdiscipline separated from aesthetics... (shrink)

What is your highest ideal? What code do you live by? We all know that these differ from person to person. Artists, scientists, social activists, farmers, executives, and athletes are guided by very different ideals. Nonetheless for hundreds of years philosophers have sought a single, overriding ideal that should guide everyone, always, everywhere, and after centuries of debate we’re no closer to an answer. In _How Should We Live?_, John Kekes offers a refreshing alternative, one in which we eschew absolute (...) ideals and instead consider our lives as they really are, day by day, subject to countless vicissitudes and unforeseen obstacles. Kekes argues that ideal theories are abstractions from the realities of everyday life and its problems. The well-known arenas where absolute ideals conflict—dramatic moral controversies about complex problems involved in abortion, euthanasia, plea bargaining, privacy, and other hotly debated topics—should not be the primary concerns of moral thinking. Instead, he focuses on the simpler problems of ordinary lives in ordinary circumstances. In each chapter he presents the conflicts that a real person—a schoolteacher, lawyer, father, or nurse, for example—is likely to face. He then uses their situations to shed light on the mundane issues we all must deal with in everyday life, such as how we use our limited time, energy, or money; how we balance short- and long-term satisfactions; how we deal with conflicting loyalties; how we control our emotions; how we deal with people we dislike; and so on. Along the way he engages some of our most important theorists, including Donald Davidson, Thomas Nagel, Christine Korsgaard, Harry Frankfurt, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Bernard Williams, ultimately showing that no ideal—whether autonomy, love, duty, happiness, or truthfulness—trumps any other. No single ideal can always guide how we overcome the many different problems that stand in the way of living as we should. Rather than rejecting such ideals, _How Should We Live? _offers a way of balancing them by a practical and pluralistic approach—rather than a theory—that helps us cope with our problems and come closer to what our lives should be. (shrink)

Humans may be the only creatures conscious of having a future, but all too often we would rather not think about it. Likewise, our societies, unable to deal with radical uncertainty, do not make policies with a view to the long term. Instead, we suffer from a sense of powerlessness, collective irrationality, and perennial political discontent. In _The Future and Its Enemies_, Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity makes a plea for a new social contract that would commit us to moral (...) and political responsibility with respect to future generations. He urges us to become advocates for the future in the face of enemies who, oblivious to the costs of modernization, press for endless and unproductive acceleration. His accessible book proposes a new way of confronting the unknown—one grounded in the calculation of risk. Declaring the classical right-left divide to be redundant, Innerarity presents his hopes for a renewed democracy and a politics that would find convincing ways to mediate between the priorities of the present, the heritage of the past, and the challenges that lie ahead. (shrink)

Marie Madeleine Jodin, actress, philosophe and feminist, published in 1790 her Vues legislatives pour les femmes, addressed to the National Assembly, one of the first signed, woman-authored, feminist works of the Revolutionary period, which has been largely neglected by scholars. This study analyses her treatise's arguments in detail, relating its two principal themes; the reform of prostitution and a plea for the Assembly to pass laws permitting divorce, to the context of Enlightenment thought, as well as to Jodin's own (...) experience. The pivotal figure of Rousseau, figured by Jodin as an apostle of liberty and moral regeneration, is also viewed as a focus of contention, given his views on women's incapacity for public life. It will be argued that Jodin's proposal to set up a separate legislative body for women to deal with domestic issues (family violence etc.) and for the reform of prostitutes, whilst seemingly subscribing to Rousseau's separate spheres ideology, is in fact a repudiation of it. Though lauding the model of the bourgeois family and the maternal ideal, Jodin's treatise gravely undermines patriarchal authority in the private and the public spheres. (shrink)

In this article, two phenomenologists are considered who both view the relation between religion and subjectivity as an affective one: M. Scheler and M. Henry. According to Scheler, the specific religious field deals with the personal appropriation of an objective modality of value. Even though he reproaches F. Schleiermacher for perpetrating a ‘Bedürfnistheologie’, there is doubt whether his own alternative is not susceptible to a similar tendency of immediacy. In the case of Henry, this tendency is striking. His (...) class='Hi'>plea for a completely immanent self-experience seems to remove divine incarnation from transcendence. Therefore it is suggested that the possibility of God’s self-revelation requires a different kind of subjective comprehension, namely by rethinking a cogital reserve in subjectivity. In his attempt, the author briefly formulates an existential-phenomenological framework in which religious pathos can claim its proper, but ambiguous place. To that end, he deconstructs two perspectives: that of any ‘gnostic’ immediacy in which the natural capacities of man, on the one hand, and transcendence, on the other, spontaneously intertwine, and any radical hermeneutics in which the necessity of a linguistic mediation tends to fall back on contextual self-satisfaction. (shrink)

Emphasis is placed in the need of taking persons seriously instead of only taking their rights seriously. Accordingly human well-being (physical, psychological and moral) is a «trump» against any sort of consideration about alleged rights that could go counter human development and well-being. Instead of current talk about classical rights such as liberty, freedom and dignity, too formal and too abstract, the paper deals with three main rights that prove to be more promising: 1) The right to be considered (...) as a being whose suffering is to be minimized. 2) The right to a free, full personal development. and 3) The right to receive care and sympathy. Against current theories of rights a plea is made for enlightened and enlarged sympathy as the foundation of rights and ethics, thus avoiding the partiality that infects Dworkin's and many other's theories of private ethics. (shrink)

On peut être surpris de découvrir dans la réflexion contemporaine un plaidoyer en faveur d’une théorie théologique avancée par certains Pères, qu’on aurait pu croire définitivement disqualifiée et réduite à un vestige archaïque, en raison de son relent mythologique, à savoir la rançon que Dieu aurait payée au démon en échange de notre libération. Cette théorie, déjà fortement contestée à l’époque patristique, vient de trouver un avocat avec René Girard pour qui « les Pères grecs avaient raison de dire que, (...) dans la Croix, Satan est le mystificateur pris au piège de sa mystification. » Le rôle des puissances sataniques avait déjà retenu l’attention de cet auteur dans Le Bouc émissaire, mais c’est dans Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair qu’il s’intéresse à ce thème patristique et tente de lui rendre une légitimité perdue. Derrière le besoin de compléter le point de vue des Pères, on devine un travail de réinterprétation où l’emprunt à la tradition ancienne risque de faire figure de pièce rapportée dans une version originale. Le rapport établi entre la croix avec la violence , tant par les Pères que par R. Girard, invite ainsi à un examen comparé, de manière à dégager la spécificité de deux systèmes de pensée, celui de Girard paraissant se situer à un tout autre niveau d’analyse que le souci simple et élémentaire qui habite les Pères lorsqu’ils recourent au mythe d’une tractation avec le démon afin de préserver Dieu du recours à la violence. It is surprising to find in contemporaneous reflection a plea in favor of a theological theory put forward by certain Fathers. One could have believed that it was definitively disqualified and reduced to an archaic vestige, and this by reason of its mythological bad odor, that is to say, the ransom that God would have paid the demon in exchange for our liberation. This theory, already strongly contested in the Patristic Age, came to find an advocate in René Girard for whom “the Greek Fathers were right to say that, in the cross, Satan is the mystifier caught in the trap of his mystification.” The role of Satanic powers already drew the attention of this author in Le Bouc émissaire [The Scapegoat], but it is in Je vois Satan tomber comme l’éclair [I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightening] that he takes up this patristic theme and tries to return a lost legitimacy to it. Behind the need to supplement the Church Father’s viewpoint, one suspects a work of reinterpretation, where barrowing from the ancient tradition risks giving the impression of a document retrieved from an original version. The relationship established between the cross and violence , as much by the Fathers as by R. Girard, thus invites us to a comparative examination, so as to clarify the specificity of two systems of thought. That of Girard seems to place itself on a completely different level of analysis than the simple and elementary concern that resides in the Fathers when they appeal to the myth where a deal is made with the devil so as to preserve God from resorting to violence. (shrink)

‘Jason…chosen leader because his superior declines the honour, subordinate to his comrades, except once, in every trial of strength, skill, or courage, a great warrior only with the help of magical charms, jealous of honour but incapable of asserting it, passive in the face of crisis, timid and confused before trouble, tearful at insult, easily despondent, gracefully treacherous in his dealings with the love-sick Medea but cowering before her later threats and curses, coldly efficient in the time-serving murder of an (...) unsuspecting child (sic), reluctant even in marriage.’ So Carspecken put the case against Jason's heroism. In the face of such an indictment, Lawall's plea in mitigation, ‘it must be admitted that [Jason] often reveals the qualities of a true gentleman’, seems somehow inadequate. Criticism since Carspecken has found various overlapping categories for Jason which both take account of the earlier negative judgements and preserve the centrality of his ‘personality’ and character in the poem: Jason is the quiet diplomat who works through consensus rather than force, his is a heroism of sex-appeal, he is an anti-hero, the embodiment of Sceptic ‘suspension of judgement’, or, alternatively, he is ‘one of us’, credible and lifelike. Carspecken himself tried a different tack: the poem is concerned not with individual heroism but with the heroism of the group (cf. 1.1, 4.1773–81). (shrink)

Plato and Aristotle thought that philosophy begins in the perplexed recognition that there are significant puzzles one does not know how to deal with. Some such puzzles can be expressed in questions of the form, ‘How is it possible that p?’, e.g., ‘How is it possible that the world had an absolute beginning?’ I discuss an example of young children asking that last question and go on, with further examples, to make a plea for cultivating such questions as an (...) educational objective, whether the perplexity-expressing questions themselves be scientific, philosophical, or both. (shrink)

The Squaring of the Bermuda Triangle. In the course of the great success of theory programs and the funding of young researchers within media studies and the history of science over the past 15 years, a generation of scholars has emerged (including the authors of this article) who have been genuinely trained in approaching interdisciplinary problems and objects. However, in view of a recently increasing renaissance of scientific ‘disciplines’, this raises the question of how to deal with such an innate (...) lack of discipline in the future. We respond here with two personal scenes that are by no means intended as a self‐adulation of our own research approaches, but as pleas for a continued multi‐voicedness between the history of science, media studies, the history of technology, and other interdisciplinary (non‐)disciplines. (shrink)

Unlike other treatments of legal punishment, this book takes both an external approach, asking why we punish at all, and an internal approach, considering issues faced by those 'inside' the practice: For what actions should we punish? Should we allow plea-bargaining? the insanity defense? How should sentencing be determined? The two approaches are connected: To decide whether to punish someone who is 'insane', or who cops a plea, we need to ask whether doing so is consistent with our (...) theory of why we punish at all. In connecting theory and practice, I draw on a broad range of thought: radical criticisms of punishment (Nietzsche, Foucault, Marxists), sociological theories (Durkheim, Girard), various philosophical traditions (utilitarian, German Idealism, modern liberalism), and the 'law and economics' movement. Against radical critics who argue we shouldn't punish at all, but who then leave us without an alternative for dealing with crime, I defend the practice, offering a version of retribution (which I distinguish from revenge and non-consequential theories) that holds we punish not to deter, reform, or otherwise augment social utility, but to mete out just deserts, vindicate right, and express society's condemnation of actions it deems blameworthy. I argue that this theory best accounts for how we do punish, and then use this theory to provide immanent criticism of certain features of our actual practice that don't accord with the retributive principle. (shrink)

In his recent study on ‘The Excessiveness of Christianity’ the K.U. Leuven professor of phi- losophical anthropology Paul Moyaert describes how Christianity is marked with excessiveness in its ethical, religious-metaphysical and mystical self-understanding. Here we deal only with the middle part of the study, on “the incarnation of meaning.” In the first part of our contribution we explore Moyaerts theory of symbol. Moyaert rightly resists both an instrumental reduction of the symbol and an intellectual reduction. But in his search for (...) the own rationality of the symbol, he inclines towards absolutising its meaning, installing an intrinsic relation between the signifier and the signified. Moyaert recognises the role of human intentionality installing a signification in the symbol, but argues that the symbol exceeds that subjective signification with an objective meaning which it brings about itself. He sees an “intimate entanglement of ‘significatio’ and ‘esse’ ” which is at the heart of what he calls a “realism of meaning.” Our argument against this reasoning is that if the symbol bridges the distance between signifier and signified in an objective relationship between both, apart from every signifying human intentionality, then this symbol escapes historicity, and brings about an absolute presence, or the divine, thus becoming what we call the locus onto-theologicus susceptible to unmasking as an idol. Moyaert partly seems to recognize this, but nonetheless defends it as the “surrealistic perspective” from which we must think the symbol. In the second part of our contribution we follow Moyaert in his application of his theory of symbol to sacramental presence, especially the praesentia realis. He replaces the terms “signifier – signified” with their religious equivalents “incarnans – incarnatum,” seeming to assume that they have the same meaning. But this is not an innocent procedure. Whereas in the symbolic the distance between both poles should be held apart in order to avoid idolatry, in the movement of sacramental incarnation God bridges this distance in His becoming present through the historical. The praesentia realisis in the tradition of the Church not the highest possible symbolic presence of God, hence a kind of “praesentia surrealis”, but God’s sacramental presence, pushed to the limit of its historicity, in a manner analogous with Jesus’ being completely one of us and yet also “without sin.” Hence does faith not occur in a perspective of surrealism, but of realism. In our evaluation, we make a plea for a theological nuance of Moyaerts theory of symbol, recognising that a symbol as signifier needs to maintain distance from its signified in order to avoid becoming an idol, and so must also be recognized the historicity of the indeed irreducible otherness of the symbol for the individual. What is distinctive about the sacrament, as opposed to the symbol, is its accomplishment of God’s Mysterious movement bridging the distance between creation and Creator. Without this nuance, Moyaerts position appears to us to fall back into to the ultimate functionalisation of faith which consists in mastering contingency through the symbolic. Indeed, Moyaert is not alone among contemporary philosophers who turn from recognizing the irreducible groundlessness of life to a rediscovery of Christianity as an inspiration for philosophical anthropology which, however, threatens to reduce faith to a kind of post-religious wisdom tradition. In those cases, one suspects that this new sympathy for Christian faith may turn out to be a Trojan horse in the mother of all religious wars, still ongoing between Greek-modern autonomy and Jewish-biblical heteronomy. (shrink)

In this radical critique of contemporary social theory, Eugene Halton argues that both modernism and postmodernism are damaged philosophies whose acceptance of the myths of the mind/body dichotomy make them incapable of solving our social dilemmas. Claiming that human beings should be understood as far more than simply a form of knowledge, social construction, or contingent difference, Halton argues that contemporary thought has lost touch with the spontaneous passions—or enchantment—of life. Exploring neglected works in twentieth century social thought and philosophy—particularly (...) the writings of Lewis Mumford and Charles Peirce—as well as the work of contemporary writers such as Vaclav Havel, Maya Angelou, Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, and Victor Turner, Halton argues that reason is dependent upon nonrational forces—including sentiment, instinct, conjecture, imagination, and experience. We must, he argues, frame our questions in a way which encompasses both enchantment and critical reason, and he offers an outline here for doing so. A passionate plea for a fundamental reexamination of the entrenched assumptions of the modern era, this book deals with issues of vital concern to modern societies and should be read by scholars across disciplines. Robert Bellah: "This is an original, incisive, and badly needed book. In prose as vigorous as his argument, Halton addresses issues urgent in many disciplines, as well as in our common culture." "Halton takes the 'ghost in the machine' as a dominant defining metaphor for modern thought and life, and criticizes it with gusto, wit, wide reading, and philosophical acumen."—Robert J. Mulvaney, _Review of Metaphysics_. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seneca, Ethics, and the Body: The Treatment of Cruelty in Medieval ThoughtDaniel BarazIn an impassioned article written in 1941 Lucien Febvre urges the writing of a history of human sensibility and suggests in particular writing a history of cruelty. 1 The general direction indicated by Febvre has been followed, but as far as cruelty is concerned his plea is still as relevant today as it was five decades (...) ago. And since cruelty is one of the attributes commonly associated with the Middle Ages, 2 it is particularly interesting to examine what and how medieval thinkers wrote on the subject.An examination of sources dealing with cruelty from late antiquity to the early modern period yields surprising results. Whereas the writings of the thinkers of late classical antiquity and of the early modern period do include discussions of the issue, the writings of medieval thinkers before the thirteenth century contain only brief remarks. The first and only exception until the end of the Middle Ages is a short question on cruelty in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Other types of medieval sources, such as legal texts, chronicles, and literary texts, reveal the same scarcity of references to the subject during most of the Middle Ages. Thus this period seems to represent a gap between antiquity and the early modern period, with a reawakening of interest in the issue of cruelty towards the end of the Middle Ages.The relative silence of medieval sources calls for identifying the factors which affected the treatment of cruelty by medieval thinkers. What are the [End Page 195] reasons for the neglect of the subject as well as for the late revival of interest in it? And when the issue is discussed, what factors shape the discussion? Two issues seem crucial to me in answering these questions: the conception of the relation between body and soul and the relative weight given to actions vs. intentions in the dominant ethical framework. A third issue, of equal importance, provides a focus for the investigation of the treatment of cruelty in the Middle Ages and the factors affecting it; and this is the reception of Seneca. As interest in Seneca’s writings grew, so did the preoccupation with cruelty. There is a close thematic interaction between these two processes, beyond the chrono-logical coincidence.Most obviously, discussions of cruelty as a subject per se referred explicitly to Seneca’s writings on the subject. Less directly, when cruelty was treated only in passing in the context of the Christian tradition, the manner in which the subject was addressed reflected a lack of Senecan influence, so that Seneca’s influence was felt through its absence. Nevertheless, the Christian tradition continued to influence references to cruelty even after the revival of Senecan influence during the high Middle Ages and to a certain degree even served as a filter, determining which aspects of Seneca’s writings on cruelty were used.Thomas Aquinas and SenecaThe first medieval discussion of cruelty as a subject per se is the question De crudelitate (2-2-159) in the section on temperance in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Aquinas bases his discussion almost exclusively on classical sources, primarily Seneca’s De clementia. 3 Seneca referred to cruelty in detail both in this work and in another moral essay, De ira. His De clementia was written at the beginning of Nero’s reign, and it is addressed to the young emperor, his former pupil. Its stated aim is to praise Nero for possessing the quality of clementia, and to show how important this quality is for rulers. 4 The concept of clementia describes a quality of political men, the term having acquired political significance since the times of Caesar and Augustus. 5De clementia was written before most of the actions which earned Nero his reputation were perpetrated; the only concrete action which may have inspired Seneca to write it was the murder of Britannicus, of which Nero was suspected. Regardless, the emperors preceding Nero were certainly not renowned for their [End Page 196] clemency. Suetonius tells that one of Caligula’s amusements was to attend sessions of torture and execution; that he insisted on slow... (shrink)

A large U.S. government investigation into arms procurement procedures with corporate contractors has recently led to guilty pleas to fraud and illegal use of classified documents. Operation Ill Wind has brought public attention to the criminal and unethical conduct of large defense contractors in their dealings with the government. This article will review how the defense contract bidding process operates and why illegal activity has been able to compromise the process. We will offer proposals to improve the process in light (...) of the present inquiry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Trinity by Thomas Joseph White, O.P.:A Model of Living ThomismSerge-Thomas Bonino O.P."The human being naturally seeks wisdom." From the very first line of the magisterial work we are dealing with, Fr. Thomas Joseph White's 2022 The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God, it is all about wisdom. Wisdom was already at the heart of a previous work by Fr. White devoted to the natural (...) theology of St. Thomas, his 2009 Wisdom in the Face of Modernity. Wisdom is more than the accumulation of information or the juxtaposition of knowledge. It is an eminent form of knowledge that, on the one hand, involves the person of the thinker in all its dimensions, intellectual, emotional, existential, and on the other, seeks to understand its object in the light of the most fundamental causes, which are simultaneously the most enlightening and explanatory principles because they are the most universal. The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God is undoubtedly a work of wisdom. Fr. White grasps the entire Christian mystery from its Trinitarian source, since, as we shall see, the entire Mystery (in the Pauline sense of the economy of salvation in Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the Father's benevolent purpose) is at the same time rooted in the eternal mystery of the triune God and makes it known to us as it unfolds its truth and saving power in time.But the sapiential nature of the object studied has some effect on the form of the work itself. Indeed, if Fr. White were not Rector Magnificent of the Angelicum, he would be a magnificent architect, because he possesses a sense of order to the highest degree and knows how to introduce unity in diversity. The presentation of The Trinity is perfectly structured, and therefore very [End Page 461] clear and didactic. Among many other factors that create its unity, I was especially interested in the highlighting of what the philosopher André de Muralt calls "structures of thought": similarities of proportionality between the ways in which authors from even very different theological epochs have treated a problem.1 I am thinking for instance of how Fr. White shows the strong structural similarities between contemporary Trinitarian theologies and the three types of medieval Trinitarian theology (the Franciscan, the Thomist, and the Nominalist). "My claim here is that the modern Trinitarian tradition tends to reproduce various elements of the medieval traditions, … albeit in creative and unexpected ways" (399). So it is a conceptually well-unified work, and where there is unity, there is being, goodness and beauty.The introduction, as I said, is placed under the sign of wisdom. Fr. White takes up there the neo-Scholastic theme of the "three wisdoms": philosophical wisdom, theological wisdom, and mystical wisdom.2 The book's perspective is explicitly that of theological wisdom, as a scientific form of the intelligence of faith, but (we shall return to this point in connection with the place given to philosophy) it puts into practice in an exemplary manner the collaboration, without confusion or separation, between the three wisdoms.3My purpose, of course, is not, nor can it be, to "summarize" the contents of a book of more than seven hundred pages, which manages to be both a comprehensive handbook for higher theological education and a true personal theological essay. I will therefore limit myself to highlighting three partial but significant aspects.(1) The first is the explicit and overt Thomistic character of the book (see 6–7). The Trinity is in fact a vibrant plea in favor of the relevance of the theology of St. Thomas, as indicated by the very last sentence:The Church today can and should still have recourse to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, and to the living Thomistic tradition, as a privileged means of interpreting and advancing her own understanding of the mystery of God.(690) [End Page 462]The Trinity is the demonstration in actu exercito of the truth of this concluding statement. I therefore propose to reflect, in the first part of my paper, on the nature of Fr. White's Thomism, which depends, as we... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Artforum, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Living:What Art Educators Can Learn from the Recent History of American Art WritingDavid Carrier (bio)When around 1980 I began writing art criticism, Artforum was much concerned with historical analysis.1 When presenting the work of younger painters and sculptors, it seemed natural to explain artists' accomplishments by identifying precedents for their work. Much of my criticism published in the 1980s presented post-formalist accounts (...) of abstract painting. Seeking precedents for the painting I admired, I looked to the history of art. But such pleas for the value of tradition were doomed. Commentators preaching the values of tradition lost out to the writers emphasizing a break with the past. Much of interest for art education can be learned by studying the history of this very influential, small circulation journal.Only in retrospect did the urgency of this felt need for a break with the past become apparent. The history of responses to Abstract Expressionism suggested a different way of thinking about moments of change. HaroldRosenberg's conception of "action painting" implied that Pollock broke dramatically with the past. Clement Greenberg, by contrast, in a famous phrase said: "I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock's 1946-1950 manner really took up Analytic Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braquehad left it...in their collages of 1912 and 1913."2 Greenberg's counter-intuitive analysis, asking us to see very different looking paintings as essentially similar, had prevailed. So it was not unreasonable to expect that after Greenberg, concern with tradition would remain important. But that was not what happened.Demand for a break with the past often carries political overtones. Historians debate whether the French Revolution broke with the past, or merely developed trends of the old regime. The idea of a complete break with tradition can seem attractive, but of course such dramatic ways of thinking underestimate real continuities. Struggle among post-Greenbergian artwriters to define a new critical paradigm mimics conflicts among artists to define the [End Page 1] leading post-Abstract Expressionist tradition. Once a critical paradigm has been established, debate may proceed peacefully. But when defining a period style is at issue, the stakes are high, and so conflicts are ferocious. Of course, struggle is always accompanied also by co-operation, but failing to grasp the real role of conflict leads to all-too-pious visions of what is possible.Greenberg developedthe most influential critical approach, and so when his way of thinking was rejected, a radically different approach was of most interest. Here we are dealing with what Harold Bloom famously called the anxiety of influence. Just as the most interesting painting after Abstract Expressionism deconstructed that tradition, so in criticism no ways of thinking too similar to Greenberg's stood a chance of being important. I think it interesting to reconstruct the process rationally in which an individual obtains such power. A totem, Freud explains, is "an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan."3 The communion bread and wine are just bread and wine, but for the believer they become Christ's body and blood. Rationally speaking, a representational painting is just pigment on canvas; and a minimalist sculpture, just shaped metal. But in what Arthur Danto calls the "transfiguration of the commonplace," "a work of art...has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks...We are dealing with an altogether different order of things."4 Greenberg became a totem. He was not just an important writer whose arguments entitled him to reasonable respect. The mere mention of his name invoked irrational fears.Greenberg was obsessed with tradition. Abstract Expressionism was rooted in early modernism, so that the era from Manet through Pollock defined a period style. Greenberg's historiography may seem inescapable. How can a young painter be understood except by seeking precedents for her achievement? Cannot the now famous artists who emerged in the 1980s be understood in these terms? Barbara Kruger comes out of John Heartfield and dada... (shrink)

Mr Ridley of the Watch Tower Society , the controlling religious organisation of Jehovah's Witnesses , mischaracterises the issue of freedom and confidentiality in JWs' refusal of blood by confusing inconsistent organisational policies with actual Biblical proscriptions. Besides exaggeration and distortion of my writings, Ridley failed to present substantive evidence to support his assertion that no pressure exists to conform to organisational policy nor systematic monitoring which compromises medical confidentiality. In this refutation, I present proof from the WTS's literature, supported (...) by personal testimonies of JWs, that the WTS enforces its policy of blood refusal by coercive pressure to conform and through systematic violation of medical confidentiality. Ridley's lack of candour in dealing with the plea of dissident JWs for freedom to make personal and conscientious decisions regarding blood indicates that a serious breach of ethics in the medical care of JWs continues. The medical community should be seriously concerned. (shrink)