The claim that common sense regards free will and moral responsibility as compatible with determinism has played a central role in both analytic and experimental philosophy. In this paper, we show that evidence in favor of this “natural compatibilism” is undermined by the role that indeterministic metaphysical views play in how people construe deterministic scenarios. To demonstrate this, we re-examine two classic studies that have been used to support natural compatibilism. We find that although people give apparently compatibilist responses, this (...) is largely explained by the fact that people import an indeterministic metaphysics into deterministic scenarios when making judgments about freedom and responsibility. We conclude that judgments based on these scenarios are not reliable evidence for natural compatibilism. (shrink)

Are we humans destined to become ‘posthuman’? In this paper, we question the claims of posthumanism, accepting some of its broader insights whilst proposing a more empirically and ethically appropriate ‘vitalist’ response. We argue that despite recent changes in styles of thought that question the uniqueness of ‘the human’, and despite novel technological developments for augmenting human bodies, we remain – fundamentally – persons. Humans, as persons, are constitutively embedded in and scaffolded by the material, social, semantic and cultural niches (...) they have constructed for themselves. An ‘ethopolitical’ response to our present that recognizes this fact not only requires us to engage with the consequences of making lives in the unequal niches that restrict and stunt the personhood of so many human beings at present, but also requires us to broaden the bandwidth of those who are recognized fully as persons. In our conclusion we briefly develop the theme that this emphasis on personhood can be seen as a vitalist – rather than a humanist – stance. (shrink)

Who is speaking in the history of social thought? The question of the authentic voice of social thought is typically posed in terms that tend to be either ambitiously theoretical or carefully methodological. Thus histories of social thought frequently offer either a résumé of general ideas about society (say from Montesquieu to Parsons) or a survey which gets bogged down in a rather tedious, nit-picking debate about empirical methodology. This paper is something of a preview of a pro jected attempt (...) on the part of the authors to capture the voice of social thought in rather different terms. Our three theses are: (1) that those who speak 'in the name of society' have just as frequently been doctors and bureaucrats as opposed to 'social philosophers' or professional sociologists; correlatively, (2) that the creative voice of social thought has more often been technical, problem-centred and tied up with par ticular rationalities of government as opposed to being either exclu sively theoretical or merely responsive to 'objective problems' in society; and, (3) that if sociology today struggles for a voice in which to speak this may be in some part due to the ways in which the past history of social thought has typically been conceived. (shrink)

Foucault is often thought to have a great deal to say about the history of madness and sexuality, but little in terms of a general analysis of government and the state.; This volume draws on Foucault's own research to challenge this view, demonstrating the central importance of his work for the study of contemporary politics.; It focuses on liberalism and neo- liberalism, questioning the conceptual opposition of freedom/constraint, state/market and public/private that inform liberal thought.

Introduction THOMAS C. HELLER AND DAVID E. WELLBERY A he essays that follow originated in a conference entitled "Reconstructing Individualism," held at ...

In a series of pre-registered studies, we explored (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios, (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neurodeterministic scenarios (that is, scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level), (c) the difference between people’s intuitions about neutral scenarios (e.g., walking a dog in the park) and their intuitions about negatively valenced scenarios (e.g., murdering a stranger), and (d) the difference (...) between people’s intuitions about free will and responsibility in response to first-person scenarios and third-person scenarios. We predicted that once we focused participants’ attention on the two different abilities to do otherwise available to agents in indeterministic and deterministic scenarios, their intuitions would support natural incompatibilism—the view that laypersons judge that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. This prediction was borne out by our findings. (shrink)

Much of the literature from political psychology has focused on the negative traits that are positively associated with affective polarization—e.g., animus, arrogance, distrust, hostility, and outrage. Not as much attention has been focused on the positive traits that might be negatively associated with polarization. For instance, given that people who are intellectually humble display greater openness and less hostility towards conflicting viewpoints (Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016; Hopkin et al., 2014; Porter & Schumann, 2018), one might reasonably expect them to be (...) less polarized. -/- We ran two studies designed to explore the relationship between various forms of humility and polarization. Our chief finding is that people who value humility are prone to what we are calling epistemic polarization—that is, judging the epistemic traits of contrapartisans negatively—which in turn plays a role in polarization more generally. Not only are contrapartisans deemed to have the wrong moral and political beliefs, they are also viewed as less humble and more arrogant, close-minded, and irrational. This makes matters even worse when it comes to the growing partisan divide. In light of our findings, we believe that the novel concept of epistemic polarization that we introduce is a promising target for further investigation. (shrink)

There has been an ongoing appeal in the bioethics literature for a broader understanding and conceptual clarity of the phenomenon of moral distress. Several authors argue that greater conceptual cl...

Early last year, the GenEthics Consortium (GEC) of the Washington Metropolitan Area convened at George Washington University to consider a complex case about genetic testing for Alzheimer disease (AD). The GEC consists of scientists, bioethicists, lawyers, genetic counselors, and consumers from a variety of institutions and affiliations. Four of the 8 co-authors of this paper delivered presentations on the case. Supplemented by additional ethical and legal observations, these presentations form the basis for the following discussion.

_English summary:_ Thomas Klinkert conducts an analysis of the poetological relationship between leisure (Muae) and narration. By studying literary texts in Italian, French, Spanish, and German from the Middle Ages to the present, he shows that in these texts the telling of stories as a social act of communication, or as an individual writing process, is realized in situations of leisure, or else that situations of leisure make it possible to reflect upon future acts of narration and of writing (...) and to bring them about. A diachronic perspective, from the 13th to the 20th century, makes apparent not only the fundamental poetological connection of leisure and narration, but also the historically specific semantizations of leisure and the different conceptions of individuality, society, and communication associated with them._ German description:_ Thomas Klinkert untersucht den poetologischen Zusammenhang von Musse und Erzahlen anhand von literarischen Texten in italienischer, franzosischer, spanischer und deutscher Sprache vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Er zeigt, wie in diesen Texten das Erzahlen als soziale Kommunikationshandlung oder als individueller Schreibvorgang aus Situationen der Musse heraus entfaltet wird oder aber wie die Musse Anlass gibt, uber kunftige Schreib- und Erzahlhandlungen nachzudenken und diesen Vorschub zu leisten. Im diachronen Langsschnitt vom 13. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert wird nicht nur der grundlegende poetologische Nexus von Musse und Erzahlen erkennbar, sondern es werden auch historisch je unterschiedliche Semantisierungen von Musse und die damit verbundenen unterschiedlichen Auffassungen von Individualitat, Gesellschaft und Kommunikation erkennbar. (shrink)

Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the New York Review of Books, Danto also has become one of the most respected public intellectuals of his generation. He is the author of some two dozen important books, along with hundreds of articles and reviews (...) which have been the center of both controversy and discussion. In this volume Danto offers his intellectual autobiography and responds to essays by 27 of the keenest critics of his thought from the worlds of philosophy and the arts. The book includes 16 pages of color art reproductions. Danto is the author dozens of books on art, philosophy, the philosophy of art, and art criticism. He is a rare philosopher who is also a public intellectual. (shrink)

Naming common odors is a surprisingly difficult task: Odors are frequently misnamed. Little is known about the linguistic properties of odor misnamings. We test whether odor misnamings of old adults carry information about olfactory perception and its connection to lexical-semantic processing. We analyze the olfactory–semantic content of odor source naming failures in a large sample of older adults in Sweden (n = 2479; age 58–100 years). We investigate whether linguistic factors and semantic proximity to the target odor name predict how (...) odors are misnamed, and how these factors relate to overall odor identification performance. We also explore the primary semantic dimensions along which misnamings are distributed. We find that odor misnamings consist of surprisingly many vague and unspecific terms, such as category names (e.g., fruit) or abstract or evaluative terms (e.g., sweet). Odor misnamings are often strongly associated with the correct name, capturing properties such as its category or other abstract features. People are also biased toward misnaming odors with high-frequency terms that are associated with olfaction or gustation. Linguistic properties of odor misnamings and their semantic proximity to the target odor name predict odor identification performance, suggesting that linguistic processing facilitates odor identification. Further, odor misnamings constitute an olfactory–semantic space that is similar to the olfactory vocabulary of English. This space is primarily differentiated along pleasantness, edibility, and concreteness dimensions. Odor naming failures thus contain plenty of information about semantic odor knowledge. (shrink)

This article explores the role of the body in Thomas Aquinas’ ethical thought, focusing on the Summa Theologiae. Drawing on Thomas’ account of human nature, teleology and ethics, it traces Thomas’ account of human embodiment through his discussion of the relationship between human and angelic nature, the beatific vision, law and virtue, and the active and contemplative lives. Against several recent accounts which have presented versions of Thomas as a thinker who is generally positive in his (...) assessment of the human body, it argues that there is a basic tension in Thomas’ thought between the desire to locate human distinctiveness in the conjunction of body and soul and the sense that after a certain point, embodiment is precisely that which obstructs progress towards God. This tension is inextricably connected to Thomas’ understanding of human calling and discipleship and poses serious challenges to any attempts to draw on Thomas’ work as an ethical resource. (shrink)

This essay responds to German theorist Thomas Lemke’s call for a conversation between two distinct lines of reception of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. The first line is comprised of sweeping historical perspectives on biopolitics, such as those of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, and the second is comprised of the more temporally focused perspectives of theorists such as Paul Rabinow, Nikolas Rose, and Catherine Waldby, whose biopolitical analyses concentrate on recent biotechnologies such as genetic techniques and the biobanking (...) of human tissues. This essay develops this conversation by bringing the two lines to bear on the neoliberal “bioeconomy” that has developed over the past three decades and uses the perspective of Italian theorist Roberto Esposito to represent the first line. Esposito’s unique combination of Foucauldian biopolitics and the Maussean gift tradition provides a critical perspective that engages and challenges the neoliberal inclination of many theorists from the second line. (shrink)

As phenomenology rose to prominence at the beginning of the 20th century, several aestheticians tried to establish the Husserlian method of “phenomenological reduction” in the field of aesthetics. These ventures were met with resistance from psychological aesthetics, which was the predominant form of aesthetics in the German-speaking world at the time. This paper examines, first, practical attempts to apply the method of “phenomenological reduction” in aesthetics. Using Waldemar Conrad and Moritz Geiger as examples, I try to trace what aestheticians (...) actually did when they applied this method in their investigations. Secondly, I reconstruct the four central objections with which psychological aesthetics reacted to such attempts. I have identified four central counterarguments in the work of Johannes Volkelt and Oswald Külpe, who were among the most eminent critics of phenomenological aesthetics: the transcendental argument, the susceptibility-to-errors argument, the constructivism argument, and the non-normativity argument. Finally, I also discuss the refusal of psychological aesthetics to acknowledge that a genuine phenomenological method even existed and the consequences of this refusal. (shrink)

This article explores the role of the body in Thomas Aquinas' ethical thought, focusing on the Summa Theologiae. Drawing on Thomas' account of human nature, teleology and ethics, it traces Thomas' account of human embodiment through his discussion of the relationship between human and angelic nature, the beatific vision, law and virtue, and the active and contemplative lives. Against several recent accounts which have presented versions of Thomas as a thinker who is generally positive in his (...) assessment of the human body, it argues that there is a basic tension in Thomas' thought between the desire to locate human distinctiveness in the conjunction of body and soul and the sense that after a certain point, embodiment is precisely that which obstructs progress towards God. This tension is inextricably connected to Thomas' understanding of human calling and discipleship and poses serious challenges to any attempts to draw on Thomas' work as an ethical resource. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 253 Sonja Thomas The Women’s Wall in Kerala, India, and Brahmanical Patriarchy On January 1, 2019, a human chain of women, between three and five million strong and 385 miles long, gathered to protest the barring of menstruating women from entering Sabarimala Temple in Kerala, India. The so-called Women’s Wall received widespread news coverage; in the United (...) States, NPR, the BBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all had stories on it. Debra Messing, Kerry Washington, and Rose McGowan tweeted about it. As a scholar of caste, gender, and religion in Kerala, India, I watched the news and international attention with a good deal of interest and a bit of unease about how the intersections of casteism and patriarchy (brahmanical patriarchy) were glossed over in the reporting. The issues surrounding the Women’s Wall reveal the ways in which certain groups invest in the protection of brahmanical patriarchal power; a power that is reflected in political tensions between the Kerala state and the Indian central government that may come to a head in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Casteism and religious divides in Kerala are rarely discussed in depth because Kerala is largely seen as a progressive state, with a 94 percent literacy rate. Other development indicators also point to the assumption that Kerala is exceptional: low infant mortality rates, low maternal mortality rates, low fertility rates, and a population where there are more women than men. Kerala is seen as secular because there is a large number of both Christian and Muslim religious minorities. In 1957, 254 News and Views Kerala made history by democratically electing a communist government and initiating a set of far-reaching (although not all-encompassing) land distribution policies. The state is seen as transgender friendly with a transgender beauty pageant and support for trans surgery. The “feminist ” Women’s Wall protest fits in quite neatly within the dominant narrative that Kerala is exceptional, progressive, and thus a model for other Indian states and for countries in the Global South to follow. However, even as “progressive” Kerala is celebrated today, it is not clear that women in the state are necessarily as empowered as commonly believed. The state has some of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation and violence against women is widespread.1 Kerala’s suicide rates are two times the national average, and Kerala leads all other states in India in the number of family murder/suicides.2 Women are vastly underrepresented in politics.3 Although women are educated, the female workforce participation rate is one of the lowest in India.4 There is evidence to suggest that educated, nonworking women are using their education toward securing a better marriage match rather than for employment or empowerment.5 Kerala has a history of extremely repressive caste practices. This area of India once not only practiced untouchability, but what is known as “distance pollution.” A Dalit (the most oppressed caste in the caste hierarchy) was not allowed within sixty feet of a Brahmin (the most privileged caste), and the mere shadow of a Dalit falling upon a dominant-caste person could result in a Dalit’s death.6 Dalit Bahujans were prohibited 1. See Swapna Mukhopadhyay, ed., The Enigma of the Kerala Woman: A Failed Promise of Literacy (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2007). 2. Jocelyn Lim Chua, In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 3. J. Devika and Binitha V. Thampi, New Lamps for Old? Gender Paradoxes of Political Decentralisation in Kerala (New Delhi: Zubaan: 2012). 4. Praveena Kodoth and Mridul Eapen, “Looking Beyond Gender Parity: Gender Inequities of Some Dimensions of Well-Being in Kerala,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 30 (2005): 3278. 5. Sonja Thomas, “Education as Empowerment? Gender and the Human Right to Education in Postcolonial India,” in Human Rights in Postcolonial India, ed. Om Prakash Dwivedi and V. G. Julie Rajan (New York: Routledge, 2016), 82; Ritty A. Lukose, Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 104. 6... (shrink)

On the night of August 22, 1791, thousands of small illuminated specks could be seen on the otherwise darkened Plaine du Nord of Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean. With a torch in one hand and a knife in the other, the slave of Saint-Domingue was destroying a society which had suppressed him for nearly one hundred years. But the agonies of that night were only the beginning of a great socioeconomic explosion, lasting almost thirteen years. During that period Saint-Domingue emerged as (...) Haiti, the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Although the American, French, Russian, and Mexican revolutions have received the attention of many scholars, the Haitian Revolution has remained in relative obscurity. Even those historians who have made a study of that turmoil often viewed much of it ideologically. In The Haitian Revolution, Thomas O. Ott provides a long-needed objective synthesis of the events and ideas which shaped this heroic period. In doing so, he has contributed significant new details and persuasive interpretations. The background of the Haitian Revolution was one of dreams and lost hopes, the substance of other great upheavals. Against this background, Professor Ott identifies and throws light upon a number of themes: the influence of the French Revolution, the abolition of slavery, the fear of revolt among other slave societies, the intervention of foreign powers, and the rise of a Black republic. Yet, he makes evident, the major theme of the period was not an event but a man--Toussaint L'Ouverture. Leaving a rather idyllic environment at Breda Plantation on the Plaine du Nord, Toussaint joined the rebels and rose from obscurity to prominence within an astonishingly short timespan. With the dexterity of a tightrope walker and the finesse of a fencer, Toussaint had outplayed all but one of his rivals for power by mid-1800. That one who remained, however, was Napoleon Bonaparte. In the final contest between these two men, Toussaint, dying a tragic death in a dank French prison, would see his vision of Haitian independence near oblivion. But the fading dream was rescued by Jean Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint's fierce lieutenant, and by the Haitian people themselves. To achieve objectivity, Professor Ott has gone beyond the sources traditionally consulted. He has utilized numerous newspaper accounts, mainly written by observant Yankee seamen, and has also investigated the American consul reports of the period. But the many French references, such as the heretofore untapped papers of Donatien Rochambeau, have not been neglected. (shrink)

The attention Seneca attracted in his lifetime and succeeding generations not only preserves information about his biography: it also merits interpretation as a cultural phenomenon on its own terms. This paper argues that the life of Seneca achieved exemplary status because it enabled Romans to think through issues critical to the preservation of social order. As a new man who rose to power as the republican noble families were dying out, Seneca posed the question of imperial succession in an (...) acute form. As a member of an imperial elite that was increasingly inclusive in its recruitment strategies, Seneca validated reliance on education and key cultural competencies as markers of elite status and legitimacy. His renown articulates a shift in emphasis within Roman culture from gloria-the old republican ideal based on zero-sum competition for honor-to claritas, or claritudo-distinction for special achievement or characteristics that grants entrée to a collective elite. The specific cultural competencies demonstrated by Seneca and noted by those who spread his renown alert us to practices the Romans especially valued, namely theatricality, the use of writing to display a persona, the mastery of general discourse, and the interpretation of politics in ethical terms. As an exemplum Seneca could be-and was-the target of both praise and blame. The story of his close relationship with Nero and subsequent tragic death placed him among the sacrificial victims Romans seemed to regard as legitimizing a social order based on domination by a well-defined elite. In addition to various of Seneca's writings, this essay considers in particular the Tacitean narrative of his relationship with Nero, Quintilian's analysis of his achievement and influence, and his depiction in Octavia. (shrink)

The purpose of the work is to compare aquinas and merleau-Ponty and see whether the thought of thomas is relevant today. It is, As presenting a different insight into being. They agree in their purposes, But seek reality differently. Thomas looks for ultimate cause, Eternal truths, And claims the soul of man is an independent, Spiritual entity; merleau-Ponty looks to phenomena to find essences, Sees truth as elusive, And claims the soul is developmental. Both affirm the unity of (...) man, However. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Proust and the Phenomenology of MemoryThomas M. Lennon"I still believe that anything that I do outside of literature and philosophy will be so much time wasted." Thus did the twenty-two year old Marcel Proust (1871–1922) write to his father, reluctantly agreeing to consider a career in the foreign service as an alternative to the legal profession otherwise being urged upon him. ("I should vastly prefer going to work for (...) a stockbroker," was his comment.)1 Happily for us all, Proust was obliged to do neither, and in fact was able to do both philosophy and literature. As André Maurois puts it, "[Proust's] great novel is philosophy incarnate."2 Certainly, In Search of Lost Time is saturated with philosophy, the appreciation of which cannot help but enhance our understanding of this great work. The thesis here will be that a loosely phenomenological account of the work's central concept of memory gives us the structure of the work as a whole.The biographical facts suggest such an approach. Proust received a license from the Sorbonne in 1895, and, more importantly, had previously been a student of the philosopher Alphonse Darlu at the Lycée Condorcet. Although he published very little, Darlu was a charismatic, inspirational figure for his students—not least of all for Proust himself, who described him as "the great philosopher whose inspired words, more certain to last than any writing would, gave birth in me as in so many others to thought itself."3 A touching artifact of Proust's time with Darlu is his report card, preserved in the Proust Museum at Illiers-Combray. Not incidentally, it shows a concentration on the classical authors who will be deployed here. We also have a wonderful little text that argues a kind of phenomenalism influenced perhaps by Hume, and certainly by Kant.4 The one author important to our account whose name does not figure as such in any of this material is Malebranche; but we know [End Page 52] that Proust was familiar with the great Oratorian since he quotes him.5 In fact, the only author appearing below who could not have been on Proust's shelf is Kundera, the most philosophical and Proustian of all recent novelists.We begin with a text; it is the most famous of all in French literature, the episode of the madeleine from the Search. The text has become so well known—through hearsay more than from having been read, no doubt—that it has invited "kitchification."6 Even so, it is an exquisite piece of writing, which, in any case, is essential to the thesis here.Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray... had any existence for me, when one day in winter as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing that I did not ordinarily take.... She sent out for one of those plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines'.... I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body.... And suddenly the memory [le souvenir] returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of 'madeleine' which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my Aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea.... Immediately the old grey house upon the street rose up like the scenery of a theatre... in a moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.7There are other such episodes of the past springing into being, but not many, and they occur but infrequently, until the very end of this vast work, when they come upon the narrator rapidly and almost... (shrink)

English summary: This book analyses the relationship between faith and love in terms of Aquinas' theology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What's Wrong with These Cities?The Social Dimension of sophrosune in Plato's CharmidesThomas M. TuozzoThe Dramatic Setting and the dramatis personae of the Charmides strongly evoke the world of late fifth-century Athenian politics. The discussion Socrates narrates takes place the day after his return from a battle at Potidaea at the very start of the Peloponnesian War;1 his two main interlocutors in that discussion, Critias and Charmides, will play leading (...) roles in the bloody oligarchic regime that rose to power after Athens' defeat nearly three decades later.2 Furthermore, the virtue the three of them discuss, sophrosune (temperance, moderation, sound-mindedness), also has strong political associations: it was a central element in the self-understanding and propaganda of the oligarchic faction to which Critias and Charmides belonged.3 The philosophical discussion of the various definitions proposed of sophrosune in the course of the dialogue, however, for the most part avoids explicitly addressing the social and political dimensions of this virtue. Much of the discussion seems, rather, to concern epistemological issues at some remove from the public sphere.4 [End Page 32l]At two critical moments in the dialogue, however, the social dimension of sophrosune does irrupt into the discussion. At the culmination of his discussion with Charmides, and again at the culmination of his discussion with Critias (which forms the culmination of the dialogue as a whole), Socrates abruptly shifts to the social level in order to evaluate a proposed definition of sophrosune. These definitions are put to the test by considering a city governed by sophrosune (as in either case defined). In both cases the examination of Socrates' hypothetical city has the effect of discrediting the associated definition of sophrosune—in the first case, because the city governed by it would not be "well governed"; in the second, because, although the citizens of the hypothetical city may be happy, their happiness would not result from the city's sophrosune as such. In both cases, then, it is the failure of sophrosune (as defined) to conduce to the well-being of the city, in a way that both parties to the discussion agree that it should, that leads to the rejection of the proposed definition.The social context in which Socrates places the most important definitions offered by his two interlocutors does more than allow Socrates to consider, on a social scale, the benefits of sophrosune as so defined. It also enables him to raise the question of the proper social relationship between sophrosune and the other crafts or kinds of knowledge practiced in a city. This question is first raised in Socrates' discussion of the first hypothetical city with Charmides. When Critias takes over as interlocutor, Socrates continues the investigation into the relationship between sophrosune and other kinds of knowledge, but for the most part in purely epistemological terms that abstract both from social context and from all considerations of benefit. The discussion of the second hypothetical city at the end of that conversation returns the question to its social context: the relations between the different sorts of knowledge are investigated via their reflection in the social relations existing between the persons that practice them. The two hypothetical cities thus allow Socrates to consider, within a social context, both questions concerning the benefit sophrosune produces (and for whom) and questions concerning its relation to other sorts of knowledge. It is in these discussions, then, that we find the dialogue's most direct contribution to some of the most important questions of Plato's earlier dialogues.It is my purpose in this essay to examine the treatment of the social dimension of sophrosune in the Charmides in order to sketch the answers to these questions that, I hope to show, the dialogue provides. This sketch will necessarily be incomplete; a more nearly complete account of this dialogue's contribution to these questions would need to integrate the present study's results with [End Page 322] an interpretation of the abstract epistemological and metaphysical arguments that loom so large in the dialogue. Indeed, it is my hope that the results of this study may provide a useful orientation for the study of these famously perplexing... (shrink)

It began with a lie. Perhaps not a big lie, at least I didn't think so at the time, but a lie nevertheless. My Vicar had taken me for an interview with our Bishop following my application, supported by him, to undergo ordination training. My Vicar had prepared me well except that he never warned me that I would be asked if I was sure that I had a vocation. I had to hazard a guess at what this question meant. (...) I wanted to be a clergyman like the Vicar and I sensed that if I answered: , to the bishop's question, I probably wouldn't be proceeding much further. So I said , not really knowing what I was committing myself to. Later I worked out that the question was meant to reassure the bishop that I had had a word from God. At the end, many, many years later, when I admitted to myself that there really wasn't a god, it was the same question that rose up to meet me. By then I had to admit that I had never, ever had a word from God. (shrink)

Depuis plusieurs années, le concept de « communs»s'est imposé pour contester le paradigme de la propriété, tant publique que privée. En effet, davantage encore que celui de « biens communs », celui-ci n'évoque pas seulement des pratiques d'appropriation (fussent-elles collectives), mais aussi bien de simples relations sociales, des manières alternatives de se rapporter au monde. Par là même, à l'heure des défis écologiques, il invite à subvertir les fondements anthropologiques de la pensée économique traditionnelle et à reformuler notre compréhension tant (...) de la sphère privée que de la sphère publique.Saisissant l'occasion de la première traduction française de l'article pionnier de la juriste états-unienne Carol Rose, « La comédie des communs » (1986), le présent ouvrage entend montrer que, loin d'être voués à l'échec et à la tragédie, les communs sont porteurs de promesses dont la portée n'a pas encore été entièrement mesurée.Avec les contributions de : Thomas Boccon-Gibod, Marie Alice Chardeaux, Pierre Crétois, Aude-Solveig Epstein, Chloé Gaboriaux, Florent Masson, Thomas Perroud, Carol Rose. (shrink)

On the Sovereignty of Mothers sets out to “think the political otherwise than as paternal or patriarchal, otherwise than as fraternal”; to “think the political as it has always been: maternal.”[1] Into this project, Anidjar enlists Thomas Hobbes, the only social contract theorist to locate the origin of sovereignty not in the right of the father over the child, nor in the right of the husband over the wife (Pateman, 1989), but in the right of the mother (p. 72). (...) In Elements of Law, Hobbes argues that the mother’s right derives not from her generation of the child but from her preservation of the child (p. 71). In De Cive, he writes that the mother who chooses to raise the child does so on the condition that, “being grown to full age he become not her enemy.” Mothers thus suspend the state of nature as a state of “universal enmity” (p. 72), occupying a double function as both “mother” and “lord.” In Leviathan, Hobbes holds that the mother’s natural dominion derives from the fact that it is she who first decides either to “nourish” or to “expose” the child (pp. 73). The maternal contract, Anidjar suggests, is that which “binds mother and child” but also “two mothers, two maternal functions, two maternal powers”: the power of preservation and the power of destruction (pp. 73), what Walter Benjamin calls founding or instituting power and divine power. It also marks a form of social life that stands between the undifferentiated multiplicity of the state of nature and the undivided unity of the commonwealth: one (the father), two (the mother), many (the state of nature). It is the sovereignty of the mother that mediates between the state of nature and the social contract. It is mothers who make and unmake the collective. It is mothers who “guard the world…preserve it and also guard us from it” (pp. 84-85). It is mothers who force the recognition that nations, unlike Hobbes’ men, are not created equal (pp. 96). [1] This piece was made possible by my Coombe Trust fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. I am very grateful for the time and space given to me by IASH. Conversations with Anthony Paul Smith helped me work through the ideas and arguments here. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores the extent to which the traditional Catholic philosophies of Thomas Aquinas influence the Irish political imagination in the nineteenth century. It looks first to Pope Leo XIII, one of the leading proponents of restoring Thomism into mainstream Catholic political thought, and the author of the influential encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). The article examines how the Irish Land War during the 1880s influenced the development and audience of the encyclical. Finally, it analyses how the Thomistic principles (...) which served as the foundations of Rerum Novarum were used by the lower-class Irish Catholic laity to legitimize incidences of protest and resistance which were considered morally illicit by the Catholic Church. In doing so, the article demonstrates how Catholicism and Thomistic philosophy influenced the way in which Irish Catholics perceived their relationship with the state and their rights as citizens. (shrink)

Chapter 4 argues that, not unlike Heaven-God, the status of Confucius in the dynastic code was subject to dispute in the first century of the Tang dynasty. The Duke of Zhou often held higher status as Sage in the temple located in the Directorate of Education in the capital, while Confucius occupied a secondary status as correlate or Teacher there. The court finally removed the Duke of Zhou from the temple in 657 and honored Confucius as Sage. From then on, (...) Confucius’s status in the imperial pantheon was secured through codification of the canonical authority for his veneration based on School Libation rites (shi dian 釋奠) described in the Record of Rites, while his rank rose with awards of ever-higher titles. The figure of the correlate in the Culture Temple (Wen miao 文廟) operated according to different principles than at Suburban Sacrifice, although in both cases the correlate established a bond between the living ritual agent (or consecration officer) and principal deity. In Culture Temple, the correlate was the Master’s most exalted disciple, Yan Hui. Eventually, as early as the Song, the correlates comprised additional and later disciples who received the Master’s transmission of the Dao (Dao tong 道統). The cosmic domain of Culture (Wen 文) was materially reproduced in the imperial temple according to a spatial design modelled on the ancestral shrine, which facilitated through ritual acts the transmission of the Dao from Confucius to those present at the rite. (shrink)

How can respect for cultural and religious differences be reconciled with the conviction that everyone has basic human rights that must be secured? Should liberal states require that non-liberal states secure human rights, and can they do so without being intolerant and oppressive? Is there a human right to democracy, and should a liberal hold that all states must become modern liberal democracies and may be pressured to reform their traditional practices and institutions? Do human rights include only the classical (...) liberal civil and political rights, and no economic rights? ;In this dissertation I defend a conception of human rights derived from John Rawls's Political Liberalism, which comprises both Justice as Fairness, the view he presented in A Theory of Justice, and the Law of Peoples, the view he presented in The Law of Peoples. According to this conception, human rights are binding on all societies, and cannot be rejected as peculiarly liberal or politically parochial. Outlaw states that violate them are to be condemned and may in grave cases be subjected to sanctions or intervention. Moreover, human rights include not only basic civil and political rights but also basic economic rights. However, while there may be a human right to live under a procedurally democratic government, it would not be a basic right but a derivative one. ;The conception of human rights that I here defend is a rational reconstruction of Rawls's view. In Chapters 1--3 I argue against the most natural interpretation of The Law of Peoples, defend a different interpretation, and expose and bridge a logical gap in that text. I then develop new responses to objections by Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge, who hold that liberals who endorse Justice as Fairness must reject the Law of Peoples as insufficiently egalitarian. I also respond to the additional objection that the set of human rights cannot include economic rights. As I show, endorsing Justice as Fairness requires endorsing the Law of Peoples, and public reason can reconcile respect for cultural and religious differences with the conviction that everyone has basic human rights that must be secured. (shrink)

The understanding of food cue associated neural activations that predict future weight variability may guide the design of effective prevention programs and treatments for overeating and obesity. The current study investigated the association between brain response to different food odors with varied energy density and individual changes of body mass index (BMI) over two years. Twenty-five participants received high-fat (chocolate and peanut), low-fat (bread and peach) food odors and a nonfood odor (rose) while the brain activation was measured using (...) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). BMIs were calculated with participant’s self-reported body weight and height collected at the time of fMRI scan and again at two years later. Regression analyses revealed significant negative correlations between BMI increase over 2 years and brain activation of the bilateral precuneus and the right posterior cingulate cortex in response to high-fat versus low-fat food odors. In addition, brain activation of the right supplementary motor area in response to food vs non-food odor was negatively correlated to subsequent BMI increase over 2 years. Taken together, the current findings suggest that individual differences in neural responsivity to (high calorie) food odors in brain regions of the default mode and motor control network serve as a neural marker for future BMI change. (shrink)

Thomas Nagel contributed to The Cambridge Companion to John Rawls with a chapter entitled "Rawls and Liberalism." He opens his chapter with these sentences: ' “Liberalism” means different things to different people. The term is currently used in Europe by the left to castigate the right for blind faith in the value of an unfettered market economy and insufficient attention to the importance of state action in realizing the values of equality and social justice.' Here are some responses to (...) Nagel. (A) Given Nagel's opening sentence, we are expecting some specifications of meanings. But in the second sentence he writes of how the term is currently used. Is that current use a meaning specification? The reader is left to guess. (B) Taken as a meaning specification, it does not look adequate. Nagel refers to blind faith, but why? There is a left-wing European who castigates the right-wing for valuing an unfettered market economy and insufficient attention to the importance of state action in realizing the values of equality and social justice, but they think that the right-wing valuation is based on argument and would not characterize the right-wing valuation as based on faith, as intuitively understood: faith as belief not based on argument. (I wonder if Nagel has an essay on blind faith somewhere!) (C) Also is "liberalism" a descriptive term or an evaluative term or a mixture? It sounds like an insult, as Nagel presents it in its European use but we normally think it is a label for a position or family of them, which does not in itself imply an evaluation. (D) Nagel's third sentence neatly contrasts the European use of "liberalism," directed at the right wing, with the American use, directed at the left wing: 'In the United States, on the other hand, the term is used by the right to castigate the left for unrealistic attachment to the values of social and economic equality and the too ready use of government power to pursue those ends at the cost of individual freedom and initiative.' There is a problem for his neat contrast of European left bashing right with the term "liberalism" and American right bashing left with the term, however: the right-wing European intellectual who (by any normal standard) rejects liberalism and gives voice to "common" concerns. Liberalism does not take into account the nature of human beings, which makes multiculturalism not doable, says this right wing fellow; and has no way of restricting its military interventions because of its doctrine of universal rights. (I knew a Polish administrator in law and she made the objection to multiculturalism; then I learnt that she is married to an Asian!) (E) In my "Davidson, Evans-Pritchard, and how I found Rose Macaulay's Told by an Idiot," I suggested that Rawls has a number of problems in the league of great philosophers. One such problem (which I cannot prove) is: although he has stellar figures who write secondary literature for him, they mostly don't do their work properly for him! They are probably planning to do better than him in the long run, despite how far behind they seem to the common man, sorry, I mean the common contemporary political philosopher/theorist. (shrink)

Thomas L. Kane, a crusader for antislavery, women's rights, and the downtrodden, rose to prominence in his day as the most ardent and persuasive defender of Mormons' religious liberty. Though not a Mormon, Kane sought to defend the much-reviled group from the "Holy War" waged against them by evangelical America. His courageous personal intervention averted a potentially catastrophic bloody conflict between federal troops and Mormon settlers in the now nearly forgotten Utah War of 1857-58. Drawing on extensive, newly (...) available archives, this book is the first to tell the full story of Kane's extraordinary life. The book illuminates his powerful Philadelphia family, his personal life and eccentricities, his reform achievements, his place in Mormon history, and his career as a Civil War general. Further, the book revises previous understandings of nineteenth-century reform, showing how Kane and likeminded others fused Democratic Party ideology, anti-evangelicalism, and romanticism. (shrink)