Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.

The _Discourse on the Method for Reasoning Well and for Seeking Truth in the Sciences_ offers a concise presentation and defense of René Descartes’s method of intellectual inquiry — a method that greatly influenced both philosophical and scientific reasoning in the early modern world. Descartes’s timeless writing strikes an uncommon balance of novelty and familiarity, offering arguments concerning knowledge, science, and metaphysics (including the famous “I think, therefore I am”) that are as compelling in the twenty-first century as they were (...) in the seventeenth. Ian Johnston’s new translation of the original French text is modern, clear, and thoroughly annotated, ideal for readers unfamiliar with Descartes’s intellectual context. An approachable introduction engages both the historical and the philosophical aspects of the text, helping the reader to understand the concepts and arguments contained therein. (shrink)

"The French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche popularized the doctrine of occasionalism in the late seventeenth century. Occasionalism is the thesis that God alone is the true cause of everything that happens in the world, and created substances are merely "occasional causes." This doctrine was originally developed in medieval Islamic theology, and was widely rejected in the works of Christian authors in medieval Europe. Yet despite its heterodoxy, occasionalism was revived starting in the 1660s by French and Dutch followers of the philosophy (...) of René Descartes. Since the 1970s, there has been a growing body of literature on Malebranche and occasionalism. There has also been new work on the Cartesian occasionalists before Malebranche - including Arnold Geulincx, Geraud de Cordemoy and Louis de la Forge. But to date there has not been a systematic, book-length study of the reasoning that led Cartesian thinkers to adopt occasionalism, and the relationship of their arguments to Descartes' own views. This book expands on recent scholarship, to provide the first comprehensive account of seventeenth century occasionalism. Part I contrasts occasionalism with a theory of divine providence developed by Thomas Aquinas, in response to medieval occasionalists; it shows that Descartes' philosophy is compatible with Aquinas' theory, on which God "concurs" in all the actions of created beings. Part 2 reconstructs the arguments of Cartesians - such as Cordemoy and a Forge - who used Cartesian physics to argue for occasionalism. Finally, it shows how Malebranche's case for occasionalism combines philosophical theology with Cartesian metaphysics and mechanistic science"--. (shrink)

Considered a foundational text in modern philosophy, the _Meditations on First Philosophy_ presents numerous powerful arguments that to this day influence debates in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion. This new translation incorporates revisions from the second Latin edition (1642) and the later French translation (1647) to make Descartes’ reasoning as lucid and engaging as possible. Also included in this edition is a brief introduction to Descartes and the Meditations. The introduction helps the reader to understand (...) the context and purpose of Descartes’ project without over-explaining his arguments. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic raised questions about the viability of food chains and created new opportunities for small-scale producers. This study reports on findings from a project directed at investigating how niche meat farmers respond to external challenges and threats including those related to their position as small-scale producers and those that are pandemic-related. A purposeful sample (N = 5) of local meat producers in NC, recruited through their producer network, were interviewed twice (in 2021 and again in 2022) via Zoom. (...) Informants were interviewed about the characteristics of their farm enterprises and households. The niche meat farmer informants in this study are diversified, values-based operations that utilize pasture-based production practices. They draw upon their farm enterprise and household assets, including the allocation of labor to farm, non-farm, and household activities, to meet economic production and social reproduction needs. Overall, our results show that the resiliency of the niche-meat producers flows from this integration of the farm enterprise and the household. While the data are based on a very limited sample, the results are consistent with literatures on women in agriculture and peasant economy. Therefore, we argue that future studies of how small-scale farms react to exogenous change, like the pandemic, include details on household composition and the gender division of labor for on-farm, off-farm, and social reproduction activities. (shrink)

In a seventeenth-century English landscape populated with towering political and philosophical figures like Hobbes, Harrington, Cromwell, Milton, and Locke, William Penn remains in many ways a man apart. Yet despite being widely neglected by scholars, he was a sophisticated political thinker who contributed mightily to the theory and practice of religious liberty in the early modern Atlantic world. In this long-awaited intellectual biography of William Penn, Andrew R. Murphy presents a nuanced portrait of this remarkable entrepreneur, philosopher, Quaker, and (...) politician.Liberty, Conscience, and Toleration focuses on the major political episodes that attracted William Penn's sustained attention as a political thinker and actor: the controversy over the Second Conventicle Act, the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the founding and settlement of Pennsylvania, and the contentious reign of James II. Through a careful examination of writings published in the midst of the religious and political conflicts of Restoration and Revolutionary England, Murphy contextualizes the development of Penn's thought in England and America, illuminating the mutual interconnections between Penn's political thought and his colonizing venture in America. An early advocate of representative institutions and religious freedom, William Penn remains a singular figure in the history of liberty of conscience. His political theorizing provides a window into the increasingly vocal, organized, and philosophically sophisticated tolerationist movement that gained strength over the second half of the seventeenth century. Not only did Penn attempt to articulate principles of religious liberty as a Quaker in England, but he actually governed an American polity and experienced firsthand the complex relationship between political theory and political practice. Murphy's insightful analysis shows Penn's ongoing significance to the broader study of Anglo-American political theory and practice, ultimately pointing scholars toward a new way of understanding the enterprise of political theory itself. (shrink)

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that (...) has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility. (shrink)

Anglican reception history of 2 Thessalonians 2:3-12 reaches back to the apostolic era and the interpreters of the early church, yet it takes on a decidedly English tone through medieval readers, such as the Venerable Bede and Lanfranc, as well as John Wycliffe and its early revolutionaries. With Parliament’s Act of Supremacy (1534), Henry VIII and England broke with the Roman Catholic Church and joined a litany of voices in opposition to the papacy, who saw in it the mystery of (...) iniquity at work, the falling away, the son of perdition, and the man of lawlessness. This unleashed a bevy of interpretations of the pericope that ranged from identifying the eschatological timeline of the NT with that of England’s Reformation to voices of restraint in the likes of Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. It was not until the end of the 17th century that apocalyptic realism began to die down and Anglicans became generally more introspective, with the papal the Antichrist tapering off and disappearing by the 20th century. Theologically, this reception history challenges Anglicans to recognize the horror of evil and to respond with vigilance, faithfulness, and hope. (shrink)

"In the United States, we try to comfort ourselves with the belief that this country, as the leading world power and industrial democracy, is different from the rest of the world--that we have solved our day-to-day problems. Such optimism--undergirded with the best of intentions--obscures the reality of the social problems that remain among us. To name only a few, these include violence, drugs, and other crime illiteracy, homelessness, and poverty and the rising rate of illegitimacy in our society. "A vigorous (...) debate over these issues, which are of such pressing concern, is taking place now in our country. It largely concerns the means we should use to address them: What is the proper role of the government in solving these problems without depriving individuals of their right to shape their own destinies?" --from the Introduction by Andrew R. Cecil. (shrink)

This paper is the first of a two-part reexamination of causation in Descartes's physics. Some scholars ? including Gary Hatfield and Daniel Garber ? take Descartes to be a `partial' Occasionalist, who thinks that God alone is the cause of all natural motion. Contra this interpretation, I agree with literature that links Descartes to the Thomistic theory of divine concurrence. This paper surveys this literature, and argues that it has failed to provide an interpretation of Descartes's view that both distinguishes (...) his position from that of his later, Occasionalist followers and is consistent with his broader metaphysical commitments. I provide an analysis that tries to address these problems with earlier `Concurentist' readings of Descartes. On my analysis, Occasionalism entails that created substances do not have intrinsic active causal powers. As I read him, Descartes thinks that bodies have active causal powers that are partly grounded in their intrinsic natures. But I argue ? pace a recent account by Tad Schmaltz ? that Descartes also thinks that God immediately causes all motion in the created world. On the picture that emerges, Descartes's position is both continuous with, and a subtle departure from, the Thomisitic theory of divine concurrence. (shrink)

One of the aspects of consciousness deserving of study is what might be called its subjective unity - the way in which, though conscious experience moves from object to object, and can be said to have distinct ‘states', it nevertheless in some sense apparently forms a singular flux divided only by periods of unconsciousness. The work of William James provides a valuable, and rather unique, source of analysis of this feature of consciousness; however, in my opinion, this component of James’ (...) theory of the mind has so far gone under-emphasized in the scholarly literature. This paper undertakes some philosophical geography, trying to draw out and elucidate some of the relevant ideas from James’ corpus, and also subjects those ideas to some analysis to try and assist in judgements of their current importance. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an increase in scholarly discussion about the viability of Confucian political ideas in the contemporary world. Since the early 1990s, some researchers have proposed that there is an upper boundary to how many individuals a human being’s social network can contain. These limitations may threaten virtue-based political theories that rely on certain assumptions about the kinds and scope of human relationships. I argue that although Confucian views may initially seem vulnerable to this challenge, the (...) Confucian sage-ruler need not worry about the limitations of one’s social network. I further argue that this problem can be overcome by using other contemporary empirical work on leadership influence, at least to some degree, while also potentially highlighting where the ultimate limits of the Confucian view might be. I aim to thereby also bring into focus organizational leadership literature that can enhance recent, empirically-informed discussions of Confucianism. (shrink)

It is widely suspected that arguments from conceivability, at least in some of their more notorious instances, are unsound. However, the reasons for the failure of conceivability arguments are less well agreed upon, and it remains unclear how to distinguish between sound and unsound instances of the form. In this paper I provide an analysis of the form of arguments from conceivability, and use this analysis to diagnose a systematic weakness in the argument form which reveals all its instances to (...) be, roughly, either uninformative or unsound. I illustrate this conclusion through a consideration of David Chalmers. (shrink)

This note examines five passages of Cicero, De haruspicum responsis in light of the commented edition of A. Corbeill. New conjectures are offered on §§29 and 50; the transmitted text of §46 is defended; and a different interpretation of the text is offered at §§37 and 61.

Are qualia natural kinds? In order to give this question slightly more focus, and to show why it might be an interesting question, let me begin by saying a little about what I take qualia to be, and what natural kinds. For the purposes of this paper, I shall be assuming a fairly full-blooded kind of phenomenal realism about qualia: qualia, thus, include the qualitative painfulness of pain (rather than merely the functional specification of pain states), the qualitative redness in (...) the visual field that typically accompanies red discriminations, the taste of lemon (independently of the fact that such states are normally caused by lemons and give rise to puckering of the lips, etc.), and so on. In other words, I am assuming the falsity of functionalism with respect to qualia, though I am not for a moment assuming dualism. (shrink)

Job 1–21: Interpretation and Commentary. By C. L. Seow. Illuminations. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013. Pp. xxviii + 971. $95.

The UWI system of universities celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2023 and as part of reflecting on this milestone the following study will examine the role of Caribbean traditional music in the UWI system and explore traditional Caribbean methods of teaching and learning music as well as the ways in which Caribbean traditional music and its associated culture have connected UWI students with local communities in Jamaica and Trinidad. Finally, through an analysis of the proliferation and teaching of traditional Caribbean (...) music ensembles at UWI’s historic campus locales in Trinidad and Jamaica, this study will offer best practices for UWI’s recently added Five Islands campus in Antigua (established in 2019) as it looks to integrate the study of traditional and contemporary music into its curriculum and campus life in an academically rigorous and culturally relevant fashion. (shrink)

America's supposed moral decline from an imagined golden age, and the threat of divine punishment for the sin of straying from the path of righteousness, have been consistent themes in its political and religious rhetoric. In Prodigal Nation, Andrew Murphy investigates the jeremiad's historical roots and probes the ways in which it continues to illuminate themes and tensions in American social and political life.

Using a dataset of corporate philanthropic gifts of $1 million or more, we examine the influence of corporate donors on the performance of recipient non-profit organizations. We find that corporate donors positively influence NPO performance, specifically in the form of higher revenues per employee, program ratios, and fundraising returns. We find little evidence that large foundation or individual donors similarly enhance organizational performance. In additional analysis, we find that large corporate donations matter when the corporation is more likely to have (...) influence over the recipient NPO. These findings suggest that corporate donors provide the monitoring and expertise needed to enhance organizational performance beyond simply providing funding to NPOs. Our results are robust to a two-stage model and propensity score matching to address endogeneity concerns. While prior research has examined the effect of corporate philanthropy on donor organization performance, we contribute to the literature by examining whether corporate philanthropy also improves recipient organization performance. (shrink)

The phrase ‘opening of the Protestant mind’ brings to mind (no pun intended) Alan Wolfe’s October 2000 Atlantic Monthly article ‘The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,’ which was itself a follow-up o...

Qualia have historically been thought to stand in a very different epistemological relation to the knower than does the external furniture of the world. The ‘raw feels’ of thought were often said to be ‘given’, while what we might call the content of that thought – for example, claims about the external world – was thought only more or less doubtfully true; and this was often said to be because we are ‘directly’ or ‘non-inferentially’ confronted by qualia or experiences, whereas (...) all other properties or objects are only mediately ‘connected’ to the perceiver. The modern turn in philosophy – spearheaded by Wittgen-stein, Sellars, Quine, Ryle and others – away from classical empiricism to today’s ‘post-postivistic’ philosophy, has apparently involved the rejection of this once familiar assumption. I argue a) that the rejection of a certain kind of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of phenomenal individuals tout court; and b) that qualia are in fact, in some epistemologically significant ways, given. (shrink)

dixerit hoc idem Epicurus, semper beatum esse sapientem … quem quidem, cum summis doloribus conficiatur, ait dicturum: ‘quam suaue est! quam nihil curo!’ non pugnem cum homine, cur tantum †habeat† in natura boni …This text, containing Cicero's oft-repeated canard, is deeply problematic. Both Reynolds and Moreschini resort to daggers here. Madvig's abeat for habeat has failed to convince, since Cicero appears to use abeo metaphorically without specifying the place of origin or destination of movement within a narrowly circumscribed semantic field (...) which does not encompass our passage. C.F.W. Müller, on the other hand, offered aberret, which can appear without such specification in the sense ‘be deceived’ or the like. Editors evidently hesitate, however, because of the difficulty of explaining the corruption. Perhaps one might rather consider the merits of haereat. haereo can mean ‘be stuck in difficulties’, but the usage is uncommon enough that it could easily have been a stumbling block for an inattentive scribe. Moreover, in some scripts where r is written with somewhat elongated hasta and an arc curving down, it can be easily confused with b; and once haebeat appeared, the ‘correction’ to habeat was all but inevitable. (shrink)

SummaryThis article examines the disputes amongst Irish Presbyterians about the teaching of moral philosophy by Professor John Ferrie in the college department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in the early nineteenth century and the substantive philosophical and theological issues that were raised. These issues have largely been ignored by Irish historians, but a discussion of them is of general relevance to historians of ideas as they illuminate a series of broader questions about the definition and development of Scottish philosophy. (...) These are represented in the move from two philosophers who had strong connections with Irish Presbyterianism—Francis Hutcheson, the early eighteenth-century moral sense philosopher and theological moderate from County Down, and James McCosh, nineteenth-century exponent of modified Common Sense philosophy at Queen's College Belfast and a committed evangelical. In particular, this article addresses three important themes—the definition and character of ‘the Scottish philosophy’, the relationship between evangelicalism and Common Sense philosophy, and the process of development and adaptation that occurred in eighteenth-century Scottish thought during the first half of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

On the eve of the 2016 election, which ushered in the Trump era, an article by Alan Jacobs in Harper's Magazine lamented the decline of the Christian public intellectual and noted the need for such figures today—what Jacobs describes as the "'Where Is Our Reinhold Niebuhr?' Problem." Jacobs has in mind the Christian social and political thinkers of the early and mid-twentieth century, such as Niebuhr, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, "and their fellow travelers," who were willing to challenge (...) the prevailing social order of the time. He characterizes Christian public intellectuals—what others might call public theologians—as follows: "They should be intellectuals who speak the language of other intellectuals, including the... (shrink)

In this article, I explore the relationship between moderation and toleration in early modern England by focusing on William Penn’s 1685 A Perswasive to Moderation. This work, published by Penn in support of James II’s campaign to implement toleration in England by royal decree, explicitly linked moderation and the campaign for liberty of conscience in which Penn had participated for nearly two decades, in both England and America. More broadly, I show how Penn’s Perswasive entered into an ongoing debate over (...) the concept of moderation itself: during the 1680s, a number of authors explored the meanings and limits of moderation, tying it to contested debates in ecclesiastical affairs, civil and religious liberty, and ethical discourse. Yet the aspirations of James II to secure liberty of conscience for the realm’s dissenters failed spectacularly in the Revolution of 1688, and Penn suffered deep public embarrassment (along with significant legal jeopardy) due to his association with that effort. The article closes with some specific reflections on Penn’s Perswasive as well as more general comments on the importance of attending to the practical, historically contingent ways in which moderation discourses unfold. (shrink)

Apropos congregatio Zetzel remarks ‘the metaphor is qualified by quasi…, as it more properly refers to animals rather than men’. It seems doubtful, however, that in general the -grego compounds were at this date felt as vividly metaphorical: segrego is used of human beings as early as Plautus and Terence ; aggrego is commonly so used by Cicero. Moreover, our passage is the first attestation of congregatio. Cicero uses the word three times in De Finibus, of which the latter two (...) passages also refer to human beings but are without quasi. Hence the use of quasi in our passage is likely to be related above all to the newness of the term, albeit the etymology may be more strongly felt in a new coinage. Cf. TLL 4, 288.26ff. (shrink)

This paper deals with the relationship between the embodied cognition paradigm and two sets of its implications: its implications for the ontology of selves, and its implications for the nature and extent of phenomenal consciousness. There has been a recent wave of interest within cognitive science in the paradigm variously called ‘embodied,’ ‘extended,’ ‘situated’ or ‘distributed’ cognition. Although ideas applied in the embodied cognition research program can be traced back to the work of Heidegger, Piaget, Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, and Dewey, the (...) current thesis can be seen as a direct response and, in some cases, a proposed alternative to the cognitivist/classicist rule-based, information-processing model of cognition. Embodied cognition, by contrast, arises from real-time, goal-oriented bodily interactions with the world. I lay out three relations: the implications of embodiment for consciousness; the implications of embodiment for the self; and the tension between these two. I argue that the embodiment paradigm introduces a radical split between consciousness and the self, and that it does so by deflating our pre-theoretical instincts about consciousness and self in two different directions; however, I claim, what both these theoretical movements have in common is a scepticism about the notion of a psychological container defining a boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ (203 words). (shrink)

I explore the main features and historical pedigree of antimodern environmental declinism, a prominent family of contemporary critiques that ascribes responsibility for environmental ills to the legacy of the Scientific revolution or “modernity” more generally. I argue that each of its three central oppositions (to the human/nature dichotomy, the dominance of scientific method, and industrialism and technology) are part of a long-standing rhetorical tradition, and are neither unique nor unprecedented. I stress the communicative, narrative, persuasive, and political nature of the (...) environmental project, rather than its claims to have arrived at an objective description of unprecedented ecological damage in late modernity. This view is perhaps less convincing to an audience looking for certainty in an age of science, but it is more faithful to the attenuated, mediated ways in which we experience and make sense of the world around us. (shrink)

Political theorists can at times forget that the origins of political theory lie in the struggles of concrete political life. This paper focuses on one arena of political contestation: the collision between dissenters and their communities’ legal systems. It focuses on The Peoples Ancient and Just Liberties Asserted (1670), a purported transcript of the trial of William Penn and William Mead for disturbance of the peace. The trial plays an important role in the emergent principle of jury independence and a (...) key role in Penn’s career as a political actor during the 1670s, culminating in his American colonizing enterprise. After a few remarks about the trial itself, the paper proceeds in two parts, each emphasizing an aspect of the text’s performative nature. First, akin to canonical works of the Anglo-American tradition, Peoples presents embedded principles: coherent and substantive visions of legitimate government, justified by reference to authoritative texts, arguments, and practices. But the defendants in Peoples also enact and embody political dissent in ways other than overt and explicit argumentation: Penn and Mead themselves appear as characters performing a politics of dissent. As a work of both political theory and political theater, Peoples offers insights into Deleuze’s notion of “dramatization,” and can lead us to a broader appreciation of the many different genres that constitute political theory. (shrink)