Tracy, Shariff, and Cheng (2010) present a timely and eloquent review of the current research on the emotion pride in terms of a naturalist framework. The present commentary not only echoes arguments relating to pride’s adaptive function, but also highlights some points of theoretical clarification. Specifically, we question the necessity of the naturalist approach and the emphasis on two facets of pride.

This paper examines the perceived ethics of advertisers and the general public relative to three ethical concepts. Based on the survey findings, it can be concluded that with regard to the ethically-laden concepts of manipulation, exploitation, and deviousness, advertisers are perceptually as ethical as the general public. The research also clarifies some of the differences between ethics and Machiavellianism.

In Slave and Sage William Ferraiolo distills and reanimates the original spirit of Epictetus' Enchiridion for a 21st century audience, and shows how the lessons Epictetus offered are more relevant than ever to modern life. Much like the original stoics, Ferraiolo's work prides itself on a combination of erudition and accessibility, to teach and counsel every reader."--Amazon.com.

Volume 13 in the RUSCH series continues work already begun on the School of Aristotle. Volume 9 featured Demetrius of Phalerum, Volume 10, Dicaearchus of Messana, Volume 11, Eudemus of Rhodes, and Volume 12, both Lyco of Troas and Hieronymus of Rhodes. Now Volume 13 turns our attention to Aristo of Iulis on Ceos, who was active in the last quarter of the third century BCE. Almost certainly he was Lyco's successor as head of the Peripatetic School. In antiquity, Aristo (...) was confused with the like-named Stoic philosopher from Chios, so that several works were claimed for both philosophers. Among these disputed works, those with Peripatetic antecedents, like Exhortations and Erotic Dissertations, are plausibly assigned to Aristo of Ceos. Other works attributed to the Peripatetic are Lyco, On Old Age, and Relieving Arrogance. Whether part of the last-named work or a separate treatise, Aristo's descriptions of persons exhibiting inconsiderateness, self-will, and other unattractive traits relate closely to the Characters of Theophrastus. In addition, Aristo wrote biographies of Heraclitus, Socrates, and Epicurus. We may be sure that he did the same for the leaders of the Peripatos, whose wills he seems to have preserved within the biographies. The volume gives pride of place to Peter Stork's new edition of the fragments of Aristo of Ceos. The edition includes a translation on facing pages. There are also notes on the Greek and Latin texts and substantive notes that accompany the translation. This edition will replace that of Fritz Wehrli, which was made over half a century ago and published without translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.1 (2003) 153-156 [Access article in PDF] Gesine Manuwald, ed. Der Satiriker Lucilius und seine Zeit. Zetemata 110. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001. 206 pp. Paper, fi49.90. In mid-February 2001 at the University of Freiburg, a symposium was held under the aegis of Professor Eckard Lefèvre on the theme "Lucilius, Identity, and Alterity." Moving with lightning speed, Gesine Manuwald edited fifteen of the papers given (...) there and had them ready in June so that Beck could publish them in record time. This is the swiftest production of the doings of such a symposium that I have come across. If only there had been some really new things to say about Lucilius, it would make this monograph invaluable. Unfortunately, no new fragments have appeared, and the identity of Lucilius remains shrouded in mystery for lack of new historical evidence. As for alterity, most of the participants in the project did not feel comfortable with addressing that aspect of Lucilius, probably again for lack of useful data on the satirist and his period.Nine of the fifteen papers come from the hands of students and faculty at the University of Freiburg. In addition, there are contributions from Johannes Christes of Berlin, C. J. Classen of Göttingen, Ursula Gärtner of Leipzig, Severin Kostner of Erlangen, Werner Krenkel of Rostock, and Eckart Olshausen of Stuttgart. All of the titles try to link Lucilius with a genre like epic, with a specific poet like Callimachus or Aristophanes, or with a cultural or historical phenomenon like the city of Rome or the times in which the poet lived. One essay alone addresses a specific satire, predictably the Trip to Sicily in Book 3, which provides enough surviving lines to allow a discussion of fifteen pages.Several of the essays illustrate the difficulty of putting a confident hand on the "identity" of Lucilius. Even the famous disclaimer of ambition to become a [End Page 153] publican in the new province of Asia, though firmly linked to Lucilius' name in its text, does not necessarily justify the conclusion that the poet is expressing personal pride as Manuwald claims. A pose is certainly struck, but what exactly is Lucilius proud of, and what does he propose instead? The statement could be the opening to his artistic creed as satirist, but it has other possibilities, e.g., the choice of an Epicurean existence or an attack on equestrian operators, and we need to advance every inference very tentatively. It is indeed quite possible that the lines came from a fictional dramatic situation.The first paper, by Ulrike Auhagen, deals with Lucilius and comedy, an important and difficult topic. In his early poems of the first edition, Lucilius wrote a number of scenes in comic meters. Before he completed that edition, he seems to have decided permanently against those meters, senarius and septenarius, and he confined himself to hexameters in Book 30, the last book of that edition. Did he also abandon the way he used the comic meters? That is, in his early satirical experiments, did he produce little comic vignettes on fictional situations, familiar in Plautus and Terence, or did he use comedy to make satiric commentary on the Rome of his day? If the former, which I had hoped Auhagen would consider, then we can infer the variety of the satura that the poet was exploring. If the latter, then Lucilius is already from his earliest works the hard-hitting moralist that Auhagen imagines, ready to turn any meter and any situation into an arena for his polemics. I would plead for more openness to alterity.Various papers deal with Lucilius' interest in other genres or writers. Thus, Andreas Bagordo downplays the connection with Callimachus, which Puelma Piwonka daringly argued. Bernhard Zimmermann considers Horace's apparent belief that Lucilius depended greatly on Aristophanes, and he puts it rightly into perspective. Manuwald shows how little the satirist admired the Greek and Roman tragedians, but she could have spent more time on the programmatic relevance of his disapproval: he was, after all, staking... (shrink)

Scenes from the music video unravel quickly under a piano loop and an 808 drum groove. The figure raps from Jesus' center seat of a long table depicting DaVinci's The Last Supper. He lies in a pile of cash as fawning women count it all around him. Cloaked in white, he stands among a sea of men dressed in black. "Sit down," he repeatedly commands while he stubbornly stands. "Be humble." The all-caps title of Kendrick Lamar's hit song "HUMBLE." leaves (...) no question that his song is, or should be, about humility. Yet, many would probably write it off as an audacious display of bravado instead. His opening question - "wicked or weakness?" - points precisely to this contradiction: a socially constructed binary between arrogance and humility. A Black man who projects strength, resilience, and pride is judged as arrogant; wicked. But to be humble is to be servile; weak. (shrink)

Renewed philosophical discourse about virtue ethics motivates the search for examples to inform and extend our thinking. In the case of environmental virtue ethics, I have decided to consult “America’s Lifestyle Expert,” Martha Stewart. Oft dismissed as a pop icon or model of domesticity, Martha’s business success is arguably a result of her claimed authority on what the good life entails and how we get it. Reviewing over 60 signed “Letters From Martha” from her monthly magazine Martha Stewart Living. (MSL) (...) I explored her presentations of current environmental topics including biodiversity, obligations to animals, gardening, global warming, and reliance on technology. I find that her work ultimately makes managing a household interesting, and encourages her public to take personal pride in everyday tasks done well. These are trademark Martha Stewart “good things.” Moreover, by connecting with a large audience few philosophers or scientists ever court, she is poised to help us manage our larger planetary household (sensu Gr. “oikos”) and frame a quality of life for future generations. (shrink)

Articles: "Generosity of Spirit" by Joseph Kupfer, "Gratitude and Justice" by Patrick Boleyn-Fitzgerald, "Humility" by Nancy Snow, "The Practice of Pride" by Tara Smith, "The Cognitive Structure of Compassion" by Martha C. Nussbaum, "Reasons for Love" by Robert C. Solomon, "The Value of Hope" by Luc Bovens, "Patience and Courage" by Eamonn Callan, "Forgivingness" by Robert C. Roberts, "Trust as an Affective Attitude" by Karen Jones.

In 1475, the Florentine humanist Piero Cennini sent a friend a letter in Latin, in which he described in detail both the Florentine baptistery and the yearly celebration of the feast of St John in late June. This article presents a full text and English translation of the document, with an introduction and notes. Cennini, a scribe and scholar, belonged to a distinguished family of Florentine goldsmiths, with whose members he collaborated on an edition of the commentaries of Servius on (...) Virgil. His description of the baptistery was informed by his knowledge of and pride in his family’s craft, as well as by the teachings of Leon Battista Alberti, which he had mastered. Cennini’s hybrid of craft and humanism enables him to fill his account of the celebration of St John with vivid detail, but his choice of Latin also makes it too artificial to convey the enchantment that the plays and processions, like the baptistery itself, inspired in other observers—a feature that helps to explain the author’s frustration with his remarkably vivid text. Drawing on contemporary texts and paintings, this article finally places Cennini’s vision on the spectrum between the magic of Florentine religion and its disenchantment. (shrink)

Design thinking in general, and optimality modeling in particular, have traditionally been associated with adaptationism—a research agenda that gives pride of place to natural selection in shaping biological characters. Our goal is to evaluate the role of design thinking in non-evolutionary analyses. Specifically, we focus on research into abstract design principles that underpin the functional organization of extant organisms. Drawing on case studies from engineering-inspired approaches in biology we show how optimality analysis, and other design-related methods, play a specific (...) methodological role that is tangential to the study of adaptation. To account for the role of these reasoning strategies in contemporary biology, we therefore suggest a reevaluation of the connection between design thinking and adaptationism. (shrink)

This chapter examines the potential danger of reclamation of land, identity, language, and pride. It is often through sound in conjunction with action that resistance becomes embodied, and recovery is possible. The first section explores the sonic traditions accompanying the Tribal Canoe Journey in the Pacific Northwest and the Festival of Pacific Arts in Oceania, both of which feature canoe families gathering at a shore and being greeted with song, dance, and the blowing of conch shells. The chapter continues (...) with an exploration of gay Harlem, noting the Harlem Renaissance as a locus of both safety and danger. It concludes with powerful and empowering acts of resistance via minority language usage (Indigenous, Ainu, Quechua, and Irish-Gaelic) in hip hop. (shrink)

This chapter explores ‘cultural citizenship’ (Winarnita, Motherhood, 2008) and ‘carework’ (Longman et al., 2013) from the site of (cyber-)kitchens. As part of an increasing cohort of transnational skilled migrants and recognizing themselves to be part of a vanishing community (Ponnapa, 2013), the Coorg community faces pressures to ‘preserve’ Kodavame - obligations to the homeland of Kodagu and its customary ways. Foodwork is one way in which culinary capital, social memory, and culturework are enacted and exchanged amidst increasing outmigration from this (...) hilly, rural district to urban India and abroad. The evidence for my arguments is drawn from an analysis of content from transnational Coorg food bloggers and community conversations sparked by these. I discuss how culinary carework manifests online by studying how ancestral and family recipes are creatively adapted in modernity, circulated as a form of intergenerational and horizontal care, and in effect become recipes for performing Coorg identities under migration. I conclude by offering my findings from food blogs as digital spaces of moral community with variant extensions of care curated online as part of kin-keeping and community-building. I discuss the affective implications of this ‘cyber culinary carework’ via the production of community pride, nostalgia, hospitality, and joy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 493-512 [Access article in PDF] William Morris: Art, Work, and Leisure Ruth Kinna William Morris's most important contribution to British socialist thought is often said to be his elaboration of a plan for the socialist future. E. P. Thompson, for example, argued that Morris was "a pioneer of constructive thought as to the organization of socialist life within Communist (...) society." 1 His vision of socialism, famously captured in his utopian novel News From Nowhere, was inspired by a number of principles, but perhaps its most notable feature was the demand that labor be made attractive. 2 As John Drinkwater noted shortly after Morris's death, Morris passionately believed that an individual who is "overworked, or employed all the while in degrading work... cannot be himself." The message of his socialism, in Drinkwater's view "one of the profoundest and most inspiriting that it has been given to any man to deliver," was that "in bringing back joy to their daily work [men]... would put their feet on the first step towards... true dignity and pride of life." 3Since Drinkwater's comments, Morris's ideas about the organization of labor in socialism have attracted a considerable amount of attention. Most scholars have argued that his ideas were underpinned by two separate concerns: his hostility to the effects of industrialization and his opposition to the division of labor. As Fiona McCarthy notes, Morris not only protested against the pollution, congestion, and "squalid industrial waste" produced by "uncontrolled factory production," he also spoke out against the "rigid organization of the factory [End Page 493] which keeps the operative virtually chained to a single repetitive task." 4 Though both aspects of Morris's work have generated considerable scholarly interest, the first has attracted more attention than the second. A. L. Morton preferred to examine Morris's attacks on the effects of industrialization in order to counter the impression that his complaints were anti-modern or that his socialism required a return to premechanized methods of production. 5 Others have argued, more positively, that the proposals Morris made for the reorganization and for the improvement of factory production in particular set him apart from his contemporaries. 6 Recently, eco-socialist writers have developed this line of thought and extolled Morris as a precursor of green theory. 7 By contrast, Morris's views about the division of labor have not been seen as either controversial or distinctive. In some accounts his ideas are straightforwardly compared to Marx's. 8 Others suggest that his understanding of the division of labor was hazy. Paul Meier, for example, argues that Morris was unclear about the problems that the division of labor raised and that he only discussed it in a very general way. 9 Both these approaches mistakenly emphasize the separateness of the two elements in Morris's thought, and the relationship between his critique of industrialization and the division of labor has been neglected. I will argue that it is this relationship, and not the two respective parts, which holds the key to his demand for the realization of attractive labor.Morris integrated his ideas about industrialization and the division of labor into a wider analysis of the relationship between work and leisure. He began to think about this relationship before he committed himself to socialism in 1883, but his mature thought was influenced by Fourier as well as Marx. The two led him to conceptualize the relationship in two distinct ways. In the first he contrasted work with leisure and suggested that attractive labor required the reduction of necessary labor time; in the second he identified work with leisure and defined attractive labor as the exercise and expression of human creativity. As will be seen, these two conceptions were not easily reconciled. The first led Morris to argue that the realization of attractive labor was dependent upon the division of labor and the increase in productivity which it fostered; the second convinced him that attractive labor required a change in working practices and [End Page 494] that its realization... (shrink)

The life of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, lord chancellor of England from 1515 to 1529, has inspired no small number of literary, historical, and dramatic retellings. A comprehensive study of these texts remains to be written, but this article seeks to make a start by examining how Tudor writers portrayed the cardinal's response to his deposition and subsequent disgrace. For some authors, Wolsey's fall only made him more proud, and he began to act erratically and disloyally, confirming the wisdom of the (...) king's decision to relieve him of office. For others, deposition moved Wolsey to become philosophical and penitent, and some such writers depict a cardinal who at the end of his life underwent nothing short of a conversion. This article traces both of these historiographical trajectories from their origins in writings of the late 1540s and 1550s through a range of late Tudor chronicle accounts. Elements of both narratives about the cardinal appear, prominently if not always congruously, in one of the best-known theatrical works about the events of the reign of Henry VIII, the play King Henry VIII by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Understanding the interrelationships between the Tudor texts presented here is essential to grasping later portrayals of Wolsey and his contemporaries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Love Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy. Edited by EDMUND SANTURRI AND WILLIAM WERPE· HOWSKI. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1992. Pp. xxii + 307. $35.00 (paper). The essays in this volume address numerous philosophic and theological issues surrounding the two commandments of love of God and love of neighbor. A brief review cannot do justice to the careful argumentatation contained in the (...) essays. Forced to make an unhappy choice, I have decided to provide some sense of the main line of argument in each piece and to add a few general comments about the dominant approaches to Christian charity in the volume. Gene Outka's "Universal Love and Impartiality," which sets the stage for many of the other pieces, asks: Should there be " no disparity between our consideration of others and our consideration of ourselves? " (3). On the basis of a sustained comparison of Christian universal love with impartiality, Outka concludes that, " while universal love allies itself with impartiality at certain junctures, it represents an advance over impartiality because it more readily accommodates differences between neighbor-love and self-love" (79-80). Christianity's normative emphasis on regard for others goes beyond impartiality toward altruism. Christian ethics is not, however, identical with altruism if the latter means that the " self does not matter." This would be contrary to the theocentric framework of the commandments, which refer directly to the "self's well-being" (82). In contrast to both impartiality and altruism, universal love accents " inclusiveness " over " comparative measurement." On a descriptive level, impartialists " fall to take seriously enough the power of self-preoccupation." The simple assertions of equal regard do not meet the need for ameliorative strategies to correct our tendencies toward selfishness and pride. There are other disparities between self- and neighbor-love and thus between universal love and impartiality. In contrast to impartiality, universal love includes "legitimate, normative self-regarding considerations." This provides a response to the criticism that Christian love involves selfannihilation. A complete passivity to others can result in a loss of a determinate sense of self; but, as Outka argues, such passivity is not 313 314 BOOK REVIEWS to be confused with Christian humility. Rather, it can be rooted in the sin of sloth, disguised as humility. The theocentric concern with the self avoids both pride and sloth through obedient willing. Finally, there are legitimate and ineradicable self-regarding considerations at the descriptive level: I cannot "promote and protect" the well-being of neighbor and self in " exactly the same way" (87). In "Who is My Neighbor? Love, Equality, and Profoundly Retarded Humans,'' Edmund Santurri contrasts the humanist and inclusive view of equal worth with the rationalist view, which identifies being a person with having a rational capacity to desire, choose, evaluate, and so forth. As a way of clarifying the Christian-humanist view, Santurri considers various interpretations of the scriptural language concerning man as an image of God. He argues that in the biblical narrative all beings born of humankind are created in God's image. He then addresses two rival construals of personhood. The first limits personhood to those who have the capacity to value their existence, while the second accords equal standing to those who can participate in communal deliberation. Both views abstract from historical and social con· nections embedded in species life (124). The argument for inclusion of the severely retarded rests not on reductionist biological principles, hut upon social phenomena: " the retarded are born of us, look like us, and interact with us in a wide assortment of highly distinctive social settings " (126). In "'Agape' and Special Relations," William Werpehowski begins by engaging Gewirth's attempt to justify ethical particularism on the basis of ethical universalism. While his view is not as susceptible to criticism as some have thought, Werpehowski is nonetheless sympathetic with the concerns of Amelie Rorty, who worries that a view like that of Gewirth " locates the focus of moral theory and moral action in the processes and rules for justification " which thus " underdescribe and underdetermine the detailed thoughtfulness required for appropriate action" (146-147). As a corrective, Werpehowski appeals to Christian moral discernment or prudence. In a number of... (shrink)

Williams and DeSteno (2010) and Gladkova (2010) question the validity, utility, and theoretical support for the bifurcation of pride into hubristic and authentic facets. Though these commentators highlight unanswered questions and important directions for future research, we argue that the broad, evolutionarily informed framework for the two facets, presented in our target article nonetheless provides the best fit and explanation for the existing pattern of evidence. We offer several empirical suggestions for future studies addressing the questions raised by the (...) commentators, and emphasize the need for emotion researchers to hew closely to empirical data in developing theoretical accounts. (shrink)

The life of ex-slave and leading 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass is a study in the relationship between humiliation, humility, and healthy pride. Surrounded by the humiliating degradations of slavery as a young man, Douglass realized that arrogance, or unhealthy pride, is the main force motivating those who enslave other human beings. This realization helped steel him for the intellectual, moral, and physical resistance that was necessary for him to find freedom. As Douglass fought for equality for himself and (...) for others, he came to understand the necessity of healthy pride. The more he nourished a healthy pride in himself, the more he was able to humble himself in service to others. Morally, Douglass showed humility in forgiving his former slave owners. Intellectually, Douglass showed humility in his break with William Lloyd Garrison over the interpretation of the US Constitution. Politically, Douglass’s views counseled national humility, not hubris. (shrink)

Since William Jones announced the kinship of Sanskrit and the European languages, a massive body of scholarship has illuminated the development of the so-called "Indo-European" language group. This new historical philology has enormous technical achievements to its credit. But almost from the start, it became entangled with prejudices and myths--with efforts to recreate not only the lost language, but also the lost--and superior--civilization of the Indo-European ancestors. This drive to determine the identity and nature of the first language of (...) humanity was deeply rooted in both near eastern and western traditions. The Bible described the perfect, transparent language of Adam and followed its degeneration, caused by human sin, into the multiple, opaque languages of later nations. The three sons of Noah became, for Jewish and early Christian writers, the founders of three distinct human groups. By the sixth and seventh centuries, historians began to magnify the deeds of certain later peoples, such as the Scythians and Goths, and to connect them with the biblical genealogy of languages and races. And in the Renaissance, speculative historical etymology took root and flourished, as national pride led European intellectuals to assert that their own modern languages--for example, Flemish--either could be identified with the original one or offered the closest surviving approximation to it. Japheth, Noah's favorite son and the forefather of the Europeans, emerged as the hero who had preserved the original language in its purity. A new history of the European languages developed, one which traced them back to the language of the barbarian Scythians and emphasized the connections between Persian and European languages. It came to seem implausible that the European languages derived from Hebrew. By the eighteenth century, in short, all the preconditions were present for a discovery that the ancestors of the Europeans, like the common ancestor of their languages, had been independent of Semitic influence. A modern scholarly thesis whose political and intellectual consequences are still working themselves out reveals the continuing impact of a millennial tradition of speculation about language and history. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. (shrink)

Rights and duties to will to believe have too long been considered an embarrassing indulgence by philosophers who pride themselves on their methodological rigor. A fresh look at William James's work will show how a more robust, though no less analytically rigorous, ethics of belief is possible.The history of James's ethics of belief is a stormy one, filled with mainly hostile criticisms on the part of others, with seminal suggestions, gropings, and retractions on the part of James himself. (...) At various points in the development of this ethics of belief, one encounters such expressions as “duty to believe,” “will to believe,” and “right to believe,” the last gaining prominence as James grew older. (shrink)

Chapter 1 is an introduction. I will examine the writings about Quakers of More, Locke, Leibniz and Hume, whether or not the writings are themselves philosophy. I explain why, except for what I say about them in chapter 1, Anne Conway, Princess Elisabeth and Spinoza are not otherwise within the scope of the thesis. Chapter 2 examines More’s three criticisms of Quakers: (1) Quaking is not a guide to divine inspiration or truth. He was right about this, but the objection (...) became less important as Quakers stopped quaking. (2) By ignoring reason and conscience, Quakers leave themselves open to supposed inspirations which are contrary to reason and good manners. Quakers behave badly, which is evidence that their supposed inspirations are not genuine. This is essentially the same objection as is made by Locke and Leibniz, whose writings we examine in chapter 2. (3) The Quakers’ emphasis on Christ within (the light within) leads them to deny Christ without, the external, historical man who died, was resurrected, and is now in heaven. They deny what More considers to be essential to Christian faith. More’s interpretation of the early Quakers was correct, as his example of William Smith’s Quaker primer for children proves. Keith sought to answer More’s objection in an appendix to the second edition of his Immediate Revelation. As the Quakers’ thinking developed and (in the case of Smith) was posthumously ‘clarified’ i.e. corrected, they and More came to agree on the necessity of both Christ within and Christ without. So this objection also became less important. Chapter 3 examines the writings of Locke and Leibniz, including their correspondence, relating to Quakers. Did Quakers really believe that their inspirations should be accepted without any check or test involving reason or scripture? Yes, as Barclay’s discussion of his second proposition in the Apology shows. Both Locke and Leibniz studied works by Barclay. Locke became very close friends with the Quaker, Benjamin Furly, but his consistent position was that Quakers were enthusiasts and, because of their refusal to test apparent inspirations using reason, vulnerable to delusions. Leibniz expressed the same position most clearly in a short piece on apologetic work drafted, perhaps, in 1685. Locke’s views were most fully expressed in Book four, chapter 19 (‘Of Enthusiasm’) of the 1700 edition of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, with which Leibniz agreed in this New Essays. More, Locke and Leibniz were each Christians, and each was concerned to defend Christianity from Quaker enthusiasm. Chapter 4 examines Hume’s writings about Quakers in his essay “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm”, his History and a letter to the Quaker Elizabeth Shackleton. His portrait of early Quaker enthusiasm is very similar to that of his predecessors: the early Quakers were deluded enthusiasts whose pride led them to think they communicated directly with God. But his discussion serves quite a different purpose. Hume’s criticism of early Quaker excesses implies that they were foolish to follow biblical precepts. His discussion of the Quakers also implies that in a religious body in which belief is no longer supported by either superstition and priests, or the fires of enthusiasm, only reason remains, and belief in Christianity will fall away, leaving only something like deism or Confucianism. (shrink)

Modern coherent disciplines like physics or linguistics were born in the earlier 19th century, as was the idea of science as systematic, ever-ongoing research.The fundamental background for what happened was the manpower needs of states, both in administration and in production. That called for modernization of the higher educational system, and led to the creation of technical high-schools and the transformation of universities, in which henceforth teaching as well as learning were to be based on research. The former type was (...) exemplified by the French École Polytechnique (founded 1794), the latter by the Prussian university reform (1809), but both were emulated elsewhere. These institutions, apart from research, produced “the modern engineer”, the high-level practitioner trained in the scientific knowledge of his own days.In the sciences the outcome was a strong expansion – first of knowledge, next also of the number of sub-disciplines, kept together however by the ideal of unified science (together with a historicist approach the main legacy of Romanticism in the sciences) but also by necessity if scientific knowledge should be applicable. Both contributing to the formation of sub-disciplines and a counter-acting force was a new, more democratic institution: the scientific congress.Most impressive was the explosion of knowledge in the natural sciences (to which we may count mathematics since the later 17th century). This, coupled to undreamed technological advances (steam power in general use, new chemical technologies, electric power, etc.) made the second half of the century see itself as an age of science (and, with pride, of imperialism).Ideologically, the most important breakthrough was probably Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of “natural selection” (certainly often misunderstood then as now). For human practical life, new mechanical and chemical technologies were much more important; so was also the germ theory for medicine (in itself, and in its assistance to social medicine).The latter, more than Darwinism (which came relatively late and remained disputed), inspired one strand in the human and social sciences to be come equally objective (in the language of the time, just as ambiguous, “positive”). They were also the inspiration for the phenomenon of “popular” (as opposed to popularized) science: movements representing “our own science”, just as good as that of the scholarly mandarins, such as phrenology, Mesmerism – and even social Darwinism and eugenics.A first text group represents the development of evolutionary thought in biology and geology, from Lamarck and Cuvier to Lyell and Darwin, and also includes Claude Bernard’s non-evolutionary but vitalist thought. A second group illustrates historicist thinking in human and social sciences (Ranke on historiography, Marx on class formation as a social process, Taine’s environmentalist history of literature, Saussure on sound shift laws, Engels on cultural anthropology).Excerpts from Clausewitz’s On War illustrates how military thought was shaped as social engineering.Mathematical and exact sciences are represented by text excerpts from Niels Henrik Abel (the new request for mathematical rigour), Mary Somerville (on the unity of the physical sciences), William Thomson and Peter Guthrie (on the understanding of experiments), and finally John Dalton’s atomic theory. It is closed by Tyndall’s Belfast address, which integrates Darwinism and physical science in a general view of the world.Last comes Jevons’s early formulation of marginalist economic theory – no stringent analysis but certainly efficient as an ideology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comments on Margaret Watkins, The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s “Essays”Jacqueline Taylor (bio)After David Hume’s death, Adam Smith wrote a letter to Hume’s publisher, William Strahan, to recount some of the final words and the attitude of “our late excellent friend, Mr. Hume.”1 Despite declining health and increasing weakness, Hume faced his approaching demise “with great cheerfulness” (EMPL xlvi). He had recently been reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, (...) and although feeling he had every reason “to die contented,” Smith describes the “jocular excuses” Hume might make to Charon to delay his death (EMPL xlv). He first requests more time so that he can see how the public responds to the latest corrections he had been making to his works, but Charon replied that this would only lead Hume to want more time to make further corrections. Hume tries another tack: “Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition,” to which Charon replies, “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years... Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue” (EMPL xlvi). This imaginary dialogue makes evident Hume’s self-awareness as an author who cared greatly about both the correctness of his written works and the influence of these works on the public.In her book, Margaret Watkins argues that Hume’s concern to open the eyes of the public goes well beyond attempts to bring about the downfall of systems of superstition.2 She credits him with the broader aim of writing essays for a literate audience that would stimulate both public and individual improvement in various areas of human activity, including government, work, aesthetic experience, and intimate [End Page 155] relationships. The first three chapters of the book examine the case for Hume’s concern with public improvement. Chapter 1 focuses primarily on the political essays, and examines Hume’s account of governing and his criticism of the irrationality apt to arise with divisive political factionalism. Chapter 2 turns to inequalities of power and the circumstances that allow some to exercise to a greater degree the domineering tendency that is part of human nature. Watkins uses Hume’s essay on the population size of ancient and modern societies to reconstruct his view on the ills—to both masters and slaves—of ancient slaveholding. She complicates this discussion by looking at modern slaveholding in the colonies, and Hume’s puzzling lack of attention to this. In the ancient world, slaveholding resulted from war and conquest, and Watkins examines how ancient warfare also led to greater ferocity and anger in fighting and exacerbated cruelty (a trait Hume had deemed the worst vice in the Treatise [T 3.3.3.8]).3 This is another place where Watkins sees Hume taking stock of modern improvements. In the wide-ranging third chapter, entitled “Working,” Watkins considers economic circumstances as moral causes that can shape character, highlighting the importance for Hume of the commercial virtues, especially industry.4 She also shows that in the four essays on happiness, modeled on Hellenistic sects, each type of philosopher regards industry, or at least occupation, as essential to human happiness. Watkins concludes that the need for industry is thus something we are naturally motivated to seek out, and so an integral part of human nature. Chapter 4, on “Composing,” shows Watkins’s talents as a philosophical essayist in her own right, as she relates art and other forms of beauty to the cultivation of calm passions. We find here an insightful discussion of art, whether composing or consuming, as having particularly therapeutic effects on melancholy and other forms of nervous conditions. Chapters 5 and 6 take up, respectively, love for oneself and love for others. The former looks at the importance Hume places on both self-love and pride. Here Watkins draws primarily on Hume’s more morally theoretical works, both the Treatise and EPM, since they have more to say about self-valuing. Chapter 6 shows how we may fruitfully read... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MetanoiaRichard G. T. Gipps, ClinPsyD, PhD (bio)A “honeysuckle on a broken fence”: Scrutton’s (2024) theologically potent image offers us a dignified vision of how a living faith and the experience of mental illness might intersect. Mental and physical illness, deprivation and bereavement sometimes provide a propitious structure on which faith’s bright strands may grow. Scrutton posits no simply causal relationship between faith and mental illness, and steers us helpfully (...) away from the narcissistic overvaluation of inner experience too often met with in (1) mysterium tremendum (meeting-God-blew-my-mind), and (3) mental openness (divine-light-pours-through-the-cracks), formulations. She helps us to avoid settling, too, for the clever-sounding but ultimately too-easy idea of (2) ‘mental illness’ and ‘religious experience’ as different descriptions under which identical experiences may sometimes be brought. For one thing, and to animadvert now in my own vein: can we really—as William James aspires to, say, when he takes it for granted that the “more personal branch [of] feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to... the divine” can be neatly hived off from the “institutional branch of religion... worship... theology... ceremony... ” and so on—even individuate the relevant experiential phenomena independently of their meaning-conferring contexts? For another, it seems to me that too often in the literature of (1) (2) and (3) do we meet with a fatal confusion that can be expressed in terms of a conflation of two meanings of “ego,” as when a) the dropping of the kinds of boundaries which it makes sense to talk of putting up (i.e., our ego’s defensive, prideful, shame-driven shirking of intimacy) is muddled together with b) the crumbling of such individuating ego boundaries as constitute us. Such a confusion gets readily promulgated by vague and tacitly polysemic talk not only of ‘ego’ but also of ‘non-duality,’ ’transpersonal,’ and ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ ‘levels’ of ‘self’ and ‘consciousness’ (e.g., see Kasprow & Scotton 1999). Sometimes driving this, one can’t help suspect, is the narcissistic gain of conflating the dismal dissolution of ego boundaries in illness (Conrad, 1958) with the epiphanic transcendence of a grasping and fearful ego. Spiritual pride and spiritual bypass (i.e. fleeing the relational tasks of adult development into a self-preoccupied ‘spiritualised’ inner journey) (Welwood, 2000) then abound, not only for the sufferer but also for the lowly therapist who now receives their shamanic guide/hierophant upgrade. By contrast with all of this, Scrutton’s (4) honeysuckle on a broken fence model stands out in its theological dignity and psychological sobriety.Even so I found myself, on reading Scrutton’s piece, wondering whether a more romantic conception of a growing faith’s possible relation [End Page 257] to psychological disturbance might yet be available and sometimes even find application. What particularly came to my mind was that notion of metanoia as offered us by the existential tradition in both theology and psychopathology.Mark’s gospel begins with John the Baptist heralding Christ’s arrival and preaching the “baptism of repentance [metanoia; μετανοίας] for the remission of sins” (Mark 1:4). Jesus’s first public words then proclaim the same message: “the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye [μετανοεῖτε], and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). ‘Repentance’ is today often understood as a sorrowful acknowledgement of one’s wrongdoings, but it has long been acknowledged that, if that be the meaning we give the term, it is an inapt translation of ‘metanoia’ (Walden, 1896). For what the gospel instead calls for is rather a wholesale turning about, or conversion, from ‘ego-dominance to surrender’ (Barron, 2021), i.e. from (a) defensive and illusory attempts to handle our vulnerability and dependency through self-reliance and self-affirmation to (b) an aliveness to grace (i.e. seeing our lives and their bounties under the aspect of the freely given gift) and a trusting surrender to the dominion of that God of love in which we anyway inexorably ‘live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). The ‘I’ in Paul’s “It is no longer I who... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kiyozawa Manshi’s Two Theories of Evolution and Their Western InspirationDennis PROOIIntroductionIf one solely were to confine the scope of one’s inquiry into the defining trait of a “Tokyo School of Philosophy” to the years immediately following the founding of Tokyo University in 1877, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that philosophy there at the time was determined almost entirely by the dominant intellectual wind blowing through its (...) lecture halls, namely that of evolutionary theory. Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916), president of the university from 1890 to 1893, was one of its staunchest advocates, doing much to foster the spread of ideas that would today be typified as “Social-Darwinian.”1 Inoue Enryō (1858–1919), undoubtedly the Meiji period’s most successful public philosopher, came to embrace many Spencerian ideas on evolution under the influence of Toyama Masakazu (1848–1900), a devout Spencerian, during his time as a student there (from 1881 to 1885).2 Ernest F. Fenollosa (1853–1908), an American philosopher who exerted great influence over the university’s young philosophical minds, was working on a synthesis of the Spencerian and Hegelian philosophical systems.3 He had been brought to Tokyo University by the Darwinian zoologist Edward S. Morse (1838–1925), who was himself instrumental in the spread of evolutionary ideas. This quick survey of Tokyo notables serves not only to establish the dominance of evolutionary theory, but also to show how in the context of late nineteenth-century Japan, “evolutionary theory” (shinkaron 進化論) is best understood as an umbrella term that could refer to a wide array of ideas—including, but certainly not limited to, Darwinian, Social-Darwinian, Spencerian, and Hegelian ones, or a mix of these—on the nature of (individual and social) change, development, and progress.Although the impact of 1859’s The Origin of Species made Darwin a figure impossible to ignore, by no means was evolutionary theory [End Page 77] equated with his theory of natural selection. For their ideas of evolution, many looked to Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), regarded by the Victorian English as the philosopher of evolution and whose system of synthetic philosophy presented positivist-leaning Meiji-era Japanese intellectuals with a definitive model of philosophical achievement. Spencer prided himself in having been the first to formulate the principle of evolution, remarking in the revised version of Social Statics (1892) that he had arrived at the general idea as early as 1850, many years before The Origin of Species had appeared in print.4 From Spencer’s point of view, Darwin had done no more than confirm a posteriori for biological organisms what was in fact an a priori law of evolution, established by Spencer in First Principles (1867) both inductively and deductively as the universal tendency of phenomena to pass from “an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity,” a process accompanied by “an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion.”5 Spencer’s nod to the materialist tradition by formulating his conception of evolution in terms of matter in motion in his own self-understanding placed him in the camp of English philosophy, which did not let itself be deluded by the wrong use of language and spurned the invocation of what from its perspective was superfluous metaphysics. The opposing camp of German philosophy—following William Hamilton (1788–1856), derided by Spencer as “absolute theorisers”—made abundant use of such metaphysics to defend a teleological understanding of evolution—the kind of understanding Darwin (with his emphasis on the non-teleological character of natural selection) and Spencer (with his focus on matter in motion) attempted to render obsolete.6Under the influence of Fenollosa, many students of philosophy at Tokyo University became attracted to the alternative German teleological model of evolution, the history of which via the German Romantics goes back to Leibniz’s attempt to reintroduce into physics the idea of final causes after these in that domain had been eliminated by Descartes.7 Descartes, to begin with, was the one to revolutionize natural philosophy by reducing the physical world to one of matter in motion ruled by efficient causation, imagining, much like Spencer two centuries later, that such a minimalist view of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Place of the Money Bag in the Secular-Mendicant Controversy at ParisRobert J. Karris O.F.M. (bio)Money bag, money bag. So many Bible-reading Christians don't know of your existence. In their defense I note that you are only mentioned twice in the entire New Testament: John 12:6 and 13:29. If faithful Bible-reading Christians don't know of your existence, what is your fate among the faithful who are less than faithful?! (...) Is ignorance truly bliss?New Testament ScholarsMoney bag, money bag. Perhaps, New Testament scholars are the reason why you are almost unknown among Christians.1 Commentators on John's Gospel give you a passing notice, if that.2 Even when they make mention of you, they [End Page 21] generally don't integrate your existence with other features of John's theology or life situation.3 As for the Jesus Seminar, its members sweep you into the dustbin of history along with 99.9% of John's Gospel.4 You see, you are deemed unhistorical. A couple of scholars involved in the quest for the historical Jesus say "Hi!" to you, but then go on with more important matters.5 Other scholars involved in the application [End Page 22] of social science methodology to the study of the New Testament opine that you were kept as a security measure and contained money to pay for the annual temple tax and such like obligations, but then they hold their peace.6Money bag, money bag. Scholars who have investigated the theme of rich and poor in the New Testament hardly give [End Page 23] you a second glance. You do not play a leading role in their general conclusions.7So, money bag, we have to take leave of New Testament scholarship if we are going to make your acquaintance on a serious level.The Middle AgesFrancis of AssisiAs we move into the Middle Ages, we ask: Did St. Francis of Assisi provide us with guidance on how to treat you with the respect that you, O money bag, so richly deserve? You see, some scholars maintain that John's Gospel was most important to Francis's worldview.8 However, Francis doesn't seem to see the problem you created for his all-consuming embrace of Jesus' missionary command of traveling with no money.9 [End Page 24] Surely Francis knows of your existence, for he refers to you in his Fourth Admonition n. 3:And the more they (superiors) are perturbed about their superiorship being taken from them than they would be over the loss of the office of washing feet, so much the more do they collect for themselves a money bag (John 12:6; 13:29) to the peril of their souls.10Francis is heir to a Benedictine spiritualization of the money bag. See how Roger the Abbot in his Sermo in ultima cena employs the money bag:Woe, how many money bags, woe, how many purses are in the monasteries of St. Benedict! Woe, how many cowls, which cover the ears of the tonsured, enclose private supplies of the mind, the money bag of one's own will, the purse of murmuring, detraction, idleness, pride, envy, jealousy, and bad will! But remember, most beloved brothers, that those who do such things follow Judas the traitor. And therefore, unless you amend your lives, you will not possess the kingdom of God.11O money bag, so Francis goes his merry way, apparently ignorant of your true meaning and leaves the problems created by your existence to his learned followers such as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. To Bonaventure we now turn, but do so through his responses to his secular opponents, William of Saint-Amour and Gerard of Abbeville. First let's hear from the secular masters. [End Page 25]William of Saint-Amour and Gerard of AbbevilleWilliam of Saint-Amour comments on John 12:6 and argues that it does not permit begging and is the basis for the normative view that the apostles and their successors should have a money bag. He writes:Augustine, 'the Lord had a purse to keep the offerings... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Negative Capability Reclaimed: Literature and Philosophy Contra PoliticsIhab HassanI began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as the murderous.Seamus HeaneyTwo concerns cross in this essay: the first, explicit, regards the current condition of the academic humanities, their idioms and axioms, especially in America; the second, implicit, regards my own need to confront criticism, its abstractions that (...) now enable, now disable, the profession and even more the experience of literature. Such concerns must mix speculation and autobiography, mix the pride with the pathos of mind.But I should admit it from the start: my title cries paradox. Negative capability reclaimed? Can reclamation dwell in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats thought, and can a critic aspire to the condition of a poet, in whom the “sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates consideration”? 1Mine, I repeat, is a hybrid critical discourse, touched by exasperation more than mystery. Yet negative capability can still serve us as emblem of certain qualities, attitudes, dispositions that we bring to literature, without turning that happy phrase into yet another slogan. Beyond the arrogance of transient ideologies, beyond the mawkishness of self-regard, negative capability may offer us a kind of patience, perhaps ascesis, the intellectual and, yes, spiritual equivalent of discipline in our moment. [End Page 305]IStated baldly, my proposition, which I will need continually to texture and qualify, is this: the prevalence of politics, the obsession with power, the unrelieved pressure of both in the university, skew our language, thought, values. Thus the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, between Homer and Plato, now cedes the field to a nastier agon between both and politics as GRIM (my acronym for the Great Rumbling Ideological Machine) grinds on. These are no abstractions; the clamorous evidence is all about, indicative even in its triviality, banality.Take a book blurb. Kathy Acker endorses a new, and quite intelligent work, entitled Male Matters, thus: “Calvin Thomas is able to hint at a way out of the prisonhouse of straight male identity.” Granted, this is but an ad in a university press catalogue. But what does the language reveal about the assumptions of academic discourse? “Prisonhouse,” really, for all unfortunate, straight males? Is a generalization of this kind permissible when blander generalizations about other groups raise such a hue and cry? Will straight African-American or Native American males feel “offended” by the statement? Or is it all a matter of restitution, categorical loyalty, political commitment? And when will that supreme fiction, the white, straight, bourgeois, rational male “subject” cease to prop up every ideological complaint?Thought blends into hype; words writhe; stereotypes become as transparent as the stereotypes they once repugned. But let us consider an example worthier of criticism. In his Inaugural Lecture as Robert Wallace Professor at the University of Melbourne, entitled “The Departure of English?” (the question mark risks disingenuousness), Professor Simon During inelegantly states: “The academic appropriation of the avant-garde transfiguration of values is happening as what I am calling the departure of English—in the relative decline of literary studies and cultural studies’ emergence.” 2 Professor During thus assumes, on behalf of cultural studies, the mantles of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Hugo Ball—where is Antonin Artaud?—and Walter Benjamin, though none really had a mantle to bequeath. For a moment, the mind reels: Nietzscheans and poètes maudits, Pataphysicians and Dadaists, as apostles of cultural studies, of political correctness, group think, and GRIM? Involuntarily, the lines of William Butler Yeats, in “The Scholars,” sing out: “Lord, what would they say / Did their Catullus walk that way?” [End Page 306]We are all free, of course, to reinvent our ancestors and to derive later authority from what an earlier generation derided—free, this side of ludicrousness. But Professor During’s argument, a sort of academic conceit, discourages mere ridicule; it has pedagogical consequences. Thus he continues: “I am certainly not claiming a causal relation between modernism circa 1900 and academic cultural studies today. Rather I want to argue that cultural studies... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:W. T. Jones SOMNIO ERGO SUM: DESCARTES'S THREE DREAMS What is remarkable about Descartes's dreams is not that he dreamed (for even philosophers presumably dream), but that he wrote down a description of his dreams and of his interpretation of them and then kept this record for more than thirty years, until his death.* What is remarkable, in a word, is that this thinker, who prided himself on his (...) rationalism and who has come to represent, at least to philosophers, the very spirit of rationalism, should have taken his dreams so seriously. Philosophers—perhaps because the dreams conflict with their view of Descartes, perhaps because they conflict with their view of themselves and their discipline—have tended to play down the dreams or to ignore them altogether. Thus, though Bernard Williams, the author of a recent volume on Descartes, refers to the dreams as "a significant event," he proceeds in a footnote to undercut the adjective by quoting Christiaan Huygens, apparently with approval, to the effect that the dreams show "a great weakness [in Descartes], and I think that it will seem much the same to Catholics who have freed themselves from bigotry." If we try to free ourselves from what seems to be a standing philosophical prejudice against dreams and dreaming, what can Descartes's dreams tell us about his theories? That is the topic of this article. But first a caveat concerning my position on the interpretation of dreams generally. The interpreter of a dream, like the interpreter of other cultural products, has to try to steer a course between the Scylla of overinterpretation (reading into the dream something that is not expressed in it) and the Charybdis of underinterpretation (missing something that is actually expressed in the dream). My own bias leads me to fear overinterpretation more than underinterpretation; I had?Descartes's original Latin record of the dreams no longer survives. A new English translation by my colleague, John F. Benton, of a late seventeenth-century paraphrase of a portion of Descartes's text appears as an appendix to this article. 145 146Philosophy and Literature rather go aground on Charybdis than be shipwrecked on the Scylla of the Freudians and the Jungians.2 I am skeptical of interpretations of Descartes's dreams that are not supported by nondream materials—on the assumption that any dynamic element expressed in the dreams that is not also expressed in nondream materials is unlikely to be of much importance for understanding Descartes's thought. Therefore, instead of beginning with the dreams and then looking here and there in nondream materials for supporting evidence, I shall begin with nondream materials and only later turn to the dreams. In a word, I shall try to read back both from nondream material and from dream material to dynamic elements which may be present in, and shaping, both. My hope is that the uncovering of these elements will result in a better understanding of nondream and dream material alike. I Accordingly, I shall begin with a brief account of some of the themes of two of Descartes's best known philosophical writings, The Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). The Discourse is particularly relevant to our inquiry because it "covers" the period in which the dreams occur, but in a very different medium from that of the Olympica and at a later date. The Discourse was in fact a discreet, as it were sanitized, version of the whole long voyage of discovery in which the dreams were but one, if nonetheless a critical, episode. Descartes tells us he had been educated "at one of the most celebrated schools in Europe" and had not beenjudged by his instructors "inferior" to his fellow students. Yet, on completing his course of study, he found himself "embarrassed with so many doubts and errors" that the only result of his efforts to instruct himself had been the "increasing discovery" of his own ignorance. Having gone through all the sciences of his time—languages, literature, rhetoric, theology, philosophy—without learning anything of consequence, he had then turned to travel, to seeing courts and armies, hoping thereby to discover the answers he sought "in... (shrink)

‘Godless’ was never a neutral term: in 1528 William Tindale talked of ‘godlesse ypocrites and infidels’ and a ‘godless generation’ is one that has turned its back on God and the paths of righteousness. An atheist, by contrast, a new and self-conscious atheist perhaps, might now wear the term as a badge of pride, to indicate their rejection both of belief and the implication of moral turpitude. Traditionally, though, those who declared themselves ‘atheist’ had a hardly better press (...) than the ‘godlesse’, since ‘atheism’ was and in some cases still is considered a form of intellectual and moral shallowness: thus Sir Francis Bacon offers a bluff refinement of the Psalmist's verdict on the fool who says in his heart that there is no God: The Scripture saith, The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God ; it is not said, The fool hath thought in his heart ; so he rather saith it, by rote to himself, as that he would have, than that he can thoroughly believe it, or be persuaded of it. (shrink)

A table of contents, in lieu of abstract Foreword by Aaron Ehasz Introduction: “We are all one people, but we live as if divided” Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt Part I The Universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender 1 Native Philosophies and Relationality in ATLA: It’s (Lion) Turtles All the Way Down Miranda Belarde-Lewis and Clementine Bordeaux 2 Getting Elemental: How Many Elements Are There in Avatar: The Last Airbender? Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa 3 The Personalities of Martial Arts in (...) Avatar: The Last Airbender Zachary Isrow 4 The End of the World: Nationhood and Abolition in Avatar: The Last Airbender Nicholas Whittaker 5 The Bending World, a Bent World: Supernatural Power and Its Political Implications Yao Lin Part II Water 6 Avatar: The Last Airbender and Anishinaabe Philosophy Brad Cloud 7 “Lemur!” – “Dinner!”: Human–Animal Relations in Avatar: The Last Airbender Daniel Wawrzyniak 8 On the Moral Neutrality of Bloodbending Johnathan Flowers 9 On the Ethics of Bloodbending: Why Is It So Wrong and Can It Ever Be Good? Mike Gregory 10 Mystical Rationality Isaac Wilhelm 11 “I will never, ever turn my back on people who need me”: Repairing the World Through Care Nicole Fice 12 Spirits, Visions, and Dreams: Native American Epistemology and the Aang Gang Justin Skirry and Samuel Skirry Part III Earth 13 Time Is an Illusion: Time and Space in the Swamp Natalia Strok 14 There Is No Truth in Ba Sing Se: Bald-faced Lies and the Nature of Lying Nathan Kellen 15 The Rocky Terrain of Disability Gain in ATLA: Is Toph a Supercrip Stereotype or a Disability Pride Icon? Joseph A. Stramondo 16 The Earth King, Ignorance, and Responsibility Saba Fatima 17 The Middle Way and the Many Faces of Earth Thomas Arnold Part IV Fire 18 The Battle Within: Confucianism and Legalism in the Nation, the Family, and the Soul Kody W. Cooper 19 Not Giving Up on Zuko: Relational Identity and the Stories We Tell Barrett Emerick and Audrey Yap 20 Uncle Iroh, from Fool to Sage – or Sage All Along? Eric Schwitzgebel and David Schwitzgebel 21 Being Bad at Being Good: Zuko’s Transformation and Residual Practical Identities Justin F. White 22 Compassion and Moral Responsibility in Avatar: The Last Airbender: “I was never angry; I was afraid that you had lost your way” Robert H. Wallace Part V Air 23 The Fire Nation and the United States: Genocide as the Foundation for Empire Building Kerri J. Malloy 24 Anarchist Airbenders: On Anarchist Philosophy in ATLA Savriël Dillingh 25 A Buddhist Perspective on Energy Bending, Strength, and the Power of Aang's Spirit Nicholaos Jones and Holly Jones 26 Ahimsa and Aang’s Dilemma: “Everyone … [has] to be treated like they're worth giving a chance” James William Lincoln 27 The Avatar Meets the Karmapa: Interconnections, Friendship, and Moral Training Brett Patterson. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain ScienceMichael J. HydeThe Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain Science. Daniel M. Gross. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. x + 194. $35.00, Hardcover.The twofold goal of this book is clearly stated by its author: "to reconstitute by way of critical intellectual history a deeply nuanced, rhetorical understanding of emotion that prevailed (...) until the triumph of psychophysiology; second, to show by way of literary and philosophical example how this rhetorical perspective helps us read anew the emotional complex of modernity, whether early or late" (8). Gross' appreciation of the function of emotion emphasizes a phenomenological orientation that is inspired by Martin Heidegger's unpublished 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric. Gross recently co-edited with Ansgar Kemmann a book of original essays dedicated to a critical assessment of this lecture course (Gross and Kemmann 2006). In concluding her contribution to the book, the well-known Renaissance scholar Nancy S. Struever maintains that the course "remains, arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric" (Struever 2006: 127). Gross advances this reading with his creative and insightful assessment of his topic.This advance unfolds as Gross, abiding by phenomenology's well-known critique of the matter, takes issue with the reductive psychophysiology of emotion that Descartes first proposed and that informs latter-day sciences of the mind and the brain. Gross turns to the research program of the distinguished cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio as a way of arguing "how brain science of emotion goes awry when it blunders into social fact" (29). The reductionism of science, in other words, misses the forest for the trees. Admitting that Damasio is open to inquiries outside the boundaries of neurobiology, Gross nevertheless takes particular issue with Damasio's model for such a project: Edward O. Wilson's, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Indeed, Wilson never gives rhetoric a nod when he acknowledges the worth of the humanities in his book.This slight, coming from Wilson, Damasio, and other scientists, fuels Gross's enthusiasm for turning to Aristotle's analysis of the pathe in book two of the Rhetoric. With Aristotle's discussion of "anger" in mind, for example, Gross emphasizes how we live in "a contoured world of emotional investments, where some people have significantly more liabilities than others" (3). [End Page 326]The point warrants elaboration: "The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions such as slavery and poverty that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they are shaped by publicity that has nothing to do with the inherent values of each human life and everything to do with technologies of social recognition and blindness" (4). Gross links this Aristotelian based social-psychological insight with such early modern philosophers, psychologists, and cultural critics as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, William Perfect, and then with such contemporary intellectuals as Judith Butler. Gross' discussion of this linkage enables him to argue a key point in his overall project: the constitutive power of emotions depends not on how the social passions originate in a moral sense equally shared by all, but rather on the "uneven distribution" of these passions in our social and political lives.Gross makes much of how the rhetoric of this uneven distribution is at work in such particular cases as Aristotle's apathetic slave, Seneca's angry tyrant, Hobbes's resentful preacher, Sarah Fielding's humble hero, and Adam Smith's compassionate spectator. Gross's intellectual acumen shines as he weaves together these cases and expands on their implications for developing a rhetorical understanding of emotion. For example, in chapter three ("Virtues of Passivity in the English Civil War"), Gross offers a critical assessment of Michael Walzer's classic The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics in order to show how the emotional makeup of passivity, too often "relegated to a diminished femininity" (87), not only informs the virtue of humility, but also helps it serve rhetorically "the most dramatic revolutionary ends" (110). Additional extended case studies emphasize the specific emotions of apathy, pride, pity... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Myth Of ReadingAlfred LouchThe Myth of Theory, by William Righter; x 7 224 pp. Cambridge University Press, 1994, $49.95.IThe critics mill about in the welcome break between interminable and terminal conference sessions, eager to see and be seen. William Righter wanders about, listening and telling anyone who stays to listen what he hears, musing all the while on what each of them has done, or tried (...) to do, or failed to do. One hopes for a dénouement—something, perhaps, like the tableau at the end of The Inspector General: critics frozen in typical and typically ludicrous attitudes. Alas, the prospective tone of ironic detachment is not sustained. Righter is too close to his perambulating colleagues; he shares too many of their academic reflexes to keep the requisite distance. If there is a tableau at the end, the reader must imagine it, and place Righter along with the rest, caught in (may we call them?) Gallosaxon attitudes.It seems to be an important conference. Everyone’s milling about. One wonders, do they have anything else to do? Here’s Derrida, de Man, Barthes, Hillis Miller, Booth, Bersani, Lyotard, Poulet, and Todorov. The remarks of one seem to flow seamlessly into the allegedly counter-claims of the next. It’s all amazingly friendly. Of course there’s that rude fellow Eagleton, who says: “Methodologically speaking, literary criticism is a non-subject.... If literary theory is a kind of meta-criticism [End Page 218], a critical reflection on criticism, then it follows that it too is a non-subject” (p. 210). But don’t mind him. For criticism is about literature and literature exists. So these promenading and posturing critics can’t be mere phantasms of brains fevered by much reading, or anyway by references to many books.Curious that the first critic available for a chat is Leavis. A bit of nostalgia that. I suppose most English critics of sufficient vintage recall their Leavis-inflicted wounds the way they might reminisce about the bit of shrapnel they got in the way of on Omaha Beach and bear now with pride. But my, how temperate he appears here! How on earth can he come across so bland? Remember him saying: Snow does not begin to exist as a novelist. Now that was Leavis. You may have disagreed with him, you may have thought him silly, but you certainly understood him, as one comprehends a slap in the face. But here: “... Leavis takes on vividly and personally the total responsibility of consciousness for a wide area of assumptions that obviously trail their implications behind them” (p. 4). This is an extraordinarily spongy way of saying that Leavis knew he was right, and if you didn’t agree with him, a humiliating place in a cheap and tawdry consumer society awaited you.Still, it is a lucky thing that Leavis appears first on the scene. As a critic to help frame more exactly the kinds of questions about literary theory and practice Righter wants to ask, Leavis offers an easily recognizable starting point. He somehow manages to take the high moral ground. You want to ask, how is it that Elijah’s mantle descends on him? Does he compel assent only by the stridency of his words, and not by an ostensibly rational way in which his critical judgments hang together?A pity if this should be so, because the point of Leavisite diatribes, though not their excesses, is close to the hearts of passionate readers. Such readers (ourselves perhaps) read judgmentally. A book bowls us over. Describing the experience we are tempted to draw invidious comparisons to other books, which perhaps move us less, or not at all. We say of minor things that come our way: it’s not Shakespeare (or D. H. Lawrence). If you agree the project comes to an end. If you don’t, you want to know what it is that bowls us over, and why we don’t find those qualities in your favorite author. You want an explanation of a particular kind, not one that adduces new facts, but one that allows us to appreciate how the case at dispute... (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. 2. Plato and the Good. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. 7. Second Temple Judaism. This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. (shrink)

From the discovery of distant galaxies and black holes to the tiny interstices of the atom, here is the very best on physics and astronomy from the New York Times! The newspaper of record has always prided itself on its award-winning science coverage, and these 125 articles from its archives are the very best, covering more than a century of breakthroughs, setbacks, and mysteries. Selected by former science editor Cornelia Dean, they feature such esteemed and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers as Malcolm (...) W. Browne on teleporting, antimatter atoms, and the physics of traffic jams; James Glanz on string theory; George Johnson on quantum physics; William L. Laurence on Bohr and Einstein; Dennis Overbye on the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson; Walter Sullivan on the colliding beam machine; and more. (shrink)

George Seddon takes a cheeky pride in his native wit, in his ability to improvise, invent, and to trip lightly over difficult terrain. These are the bush virtues of the Man from Snowy River. In this essay I reflect upon the interdisciplinary (and undisciplined) nature of Seddon's vision and practice, and place him in a tradition of nature and landscape writing in Australia that goes back to the 19th century. But I also suggest that he has been ahead of (...) his time in many ways, particularly in his anticipation of the field of environmental history. He has been one of the people who has generated new environmental narratives that indigenize Australia, and which undermine the dominant imperialist, diffusionist, one-way accounts of origins. In this sense, Seddon has creatively embraced - and sometimes overturned - the predicament of the antipodean. Seddon happily combines poetry and practice. He became known as the `powerline man' in landscape planning, and enjoyed quoting William Blake to the State Electricity Commission of Victoria in his report on the Loy Yang coal field development. By analysing his 1998 submission to the Snowy Water Inquiry, the essay shows how Seddon unites `good science, good planning, good design, and good communication', and offers environmental wisdom that is both highly intellectual and extremely practical. (shrink)

We cannot escape Indiana Jones! (Not that we would want to, of course.) Harrison Ford deserves credit for the character's popularity. His ability to subtly play up Indy's foibles while playing down the character's heroism, makes Indiana Jones relatable. Of course, Lucas and the screenwriters are also responsible, as they magnificently depict Indy battling antagonists seeking to possess mystical objects for world domination. But Indy is no mere action hero. He also struggles with unrequited love that lingers for decades, an (...) estrangement from his over-bearing father that lasts just as long, and a life-long obsession with regaining an important object unfairly taken from him. As we know, Indy doesn't always choose wisely, and if the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles are to be trusted, he made many missteps in his youth on the way to becoming the hero we know and love. Indy loses a fight as often as he wins, and when he wins, he doesn't always fight fairly. In fact, he stumbles so often, one might wonder why he persists decade after decade toward his goals. He's not getting any younger. What's the point? And, as he inexplicably trudges on, he-in the four films and various graphic novels-has many alleged encounters with the supernatural. He's not a religious person (at all), so what should he make of those? Should he take the leap of faith and become a believer? While we often see him conducting his highly unconventional fieldwork, spending an unusual amount of time in caves, he cannot completely ignore his "day job" teaching undergraduates and aiding their pursuit of knowledge. But why should archaeologists strive to put artifacts in a museum, or search for "fact," but not "truth" (and who is Dr. Tyree, anyway)? The Indiana Jones character is expressive of the human condition, vividly illuminating our struggles and issues on the big screen. True, we don't have John Williams's orchestra filling us with pride when we manage to do the right thing or play the part of the hero. Still, no one would blame you if you imagined Indy's theme blaring in the background while rising to meet a challenge! (shrink)

A leading social reformer and pioneering abolitionist, British journalist Harriet Martineau fueled the debate over the abolition of slavery that raged on both sides of the Atlantic before the American Civil War. Her impassioned writings about abolition—with more than fifty essays and articles collected in this premier annotated edition—provide piercing insights into American society, politics, and the issue of slavery. Determined to give a fair, objective hearing to both sides of the American slavery debate, Martineau crossed the ocean in 1834 (...) and discovered a nation in turmoil. As a prominent writer, she was vigorously courted by both opponents and supporters of slavery who sought her endorsement for their political cause. From northern mansions to southern plantations, from Congress and President Jackson's White House to hospitals, factories, and slave quarters, people opened their doors to Martineau, providing her an unusually comprehensive view of American life. Shocked by the intensity of the controversy over slavery, and inspired by the bravery and defiance of abolitionists who campaigned in the face of social pressure and physical danger, Martineau publicly declared her support of abolition in 1835. Joining the ranks of the abolitionists made Martineau a prime target for persecution, and the remainder of her stay in America was fraught with death threats. She returned to England and promoted her cause by writing for the British periodical press, a career that would span the next thirty-five years. Martineau's friend and fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison praised her as a "social heretic" whose compulsion to uphold the moral ground of human dignity and freedom outweighed any concern with popular opinions about her character or reputation. Twenty years after her dramatic American tour, Martineau wrote with pride that her name was "still reviled" in the South. One of the first women to earn a living by her pen, Martineau never faltered in the lifelong crusade that placed her in the forefront of political and social reform efforts. _Writings on Slavery and the American Civil War_ conveys one woman's persistent call for absolute, immediate, and universal emancipation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Timothy Richard's Buddhist-Christian StudiesLai Pan-chiuTimothy Richard (1845–1919), one of the most well-known nineteenth-century British missionaries who worked in China, is still remembered today for his efforts to disseminate "Western learning" and to promote social welfare and political reform in China.2 Interestingly, although Richard's missionary, educational, and political activities undoubtedly dominated his life in China, he also found the time to translate a number of Buddhist texts from Chinese into (...) English.3 Unlike many of his fellow Christian missionaries, who either despised or ignored Chinese Buddhism, Richard endeavored to promote a dialogue between Christianity and other religions, especially Chinese Buddhism. In fact, his translations inspired several other European missionaries and Sinologists to take a greater interest in Chinese Buddhism, particularly Richard's biographer William E. Soothill (1861–1935) and Karl Ludvig Reichelt (1877–1952),4 the founder of Tao Fong Shan, which continues to promote Buddhist-Christian dialogue several decades after its foundation.5 However, Richard's translations of Chinese Buddhist texts, particular his translation of The Awakening of Faith, have been largely neglected by both Buddhists and Sinologists. As a result, the significance of Richard's dialogue with Chinese Buddhism has not yet been properly evaluated.Two recent studies of Richard have focused on his translation of the Buddhist texts and his dialogue with Chinese Buddhism.6 Unlike previous studies, which have viewed Richard as a missionary and analyzed his interpretation of Buddhism from the perspective of interreligious dialogue, the present study attempts to treat him as a Sinologist and review his Buddhist studies from the perspective of Oriental studies. This paper attempts to evaluate critically Richard's interpretation of Chinese Buddhism in the light of the recent debate over Orientalism triggered by the influential critique of the Orientalist enterprise by Edward Said (1935–2003).7 Richard King has examined European studies of Eastern religions in light of this debate and has tried to determine whether these "Orientalist" studies displayed the characteristics of the Orientalist approach criticized by Said. Such characteristics included "textualism" (which identifies a religion with a set of "sacred" texts), "essentialism" (which tends to assume a dualistic demarcation between the East and the West), and the colonial ideology (which legitimated Europeans' pride in their cultural superiority and colonial power).8 Whereas King's study was concerned principally with India, the present study focuses on the [End Page 23] case of Timothy Richard in China but will adopt a similar perspective. I will consider whether Richard's representation of Chinese Buddhism is infected by the textualism, essentialism, and dualistic demarcation between the East and the West that Said identified as the hallmarks of Orientalism, and whether it tended to reflect or legitimize Western colonial ideologies.My exposition of Richard's position will be based mainly on two of his most important works, The New Testament of Higher Buddhism (1910) and An Epistle to All Buddhists (1916). These texts will help us to understand why Richard translated Buddhist texts into English and how he saw the relationship between his studies of Chinese Buddhism and his missionary work. I will try to show that Richard's attempts to promote Buddhist-Christian dialogue were underlain and motivated by his concern for a kingdom—not the Earthly United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of which he was a citizen, nor a Heavenly Kingdom unrelated to the present world, but an imminent "Kingdom of World Peace," whose blessings would be enjoyed by all the peoples of the Earth.Richard's Studies of Chinese Buddhism in Their Historical ContextsIn order to understand the historical significance of Timothy Richard's study of Chinese Buddhism, it is necessary to place him in the historical context of the missionary attitudes toward Chinese religions and of the studies of Buddhism in the West.Catholic missionaries had been active in China since the sixteenth century, long before the arrival of the Protestant missionaries in the early nineteenth century. Although some of the Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits, initially dressed like Buddhist monks, they soon changed into the robes of Confucian scholars, having discovered that most Chinese respected Confucian scholars more than Buddhist monks. Besides changing their outward... (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated the relative priority of thought and language, both at the deepest level, in asking what makes us distinctively human, and more superficially, in explaining why we find it so natural to communicate with words. The “linguistic turn” in analytic philosophy accorded pride of place to language in the order of investigation, but only because it treated language as a window onto thought, which it took to be fundamental in the order of explanation. The Chomskian linguistic (...) program tips the balance further toward language, by construing the language faculty as an independent, distinctively human biological mechanism. Devitt (Ignorance of language. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006) attempts to swing the pendulum back toward the other extreme, by proposing that thought itself is fundamentally sentential, and that there is little or nothing for language to do beyond reflecting the structure and content of thought. I argue that both thought and language involve a greater diversity of function and form than either the Chomskian model or Devitt’s antithesis acknowledge. Both thought and language are better seen as complex, mutually supporting suites of interacting abilities. (shrink)

Collins and Pinch contend that the cold fusion episode illustrates their claim that the evaluation of science hypotheses is strongly influenced by the interests of the parties concerned instead of epistemic factors. This essay looks at this case in detail, and concludes that it offers no support for the Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) account.

This essay, one of the last that Frankena wrote, provides a scrupulously detailed exploration of the various possible meanings of one of Sidgwick's most famous footnotes in the Methods Long intrigued by what Sidgwick had in mind when he said that he would explain how it came about that for moderns it is not tautologous to claim that one's own good is one's only reasonable ultimate end, Frankena uses this note as a point of departure for a penetrating review of (...) Sidgwick's insights and ambiguities on the differences between ancient and modern ethics. (shrink)

Eldon Soifer and Béla Szabados argue that hypocrisy poses a problem for consequentialism because the hypocrite, in pretending to live up to a norm he or she does not really accept, acts in ways that have good results. They argue, however, that consequentialists can meet this challenge and show the wrongness of hypocrisy by adopting a desirefulfilment version of their theory. This essay raises some doubts about Soifer and Szabados's proposal and argues that consequentialism has no difficulty coming to grips (...) with hypocrisy, whether or not one favours a desire-fulfilment account of the good. (shrink)