This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential philosophers of the (...) seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an epilogue the author discusses Kant's view of his own historicity, and of the aims of moral philosophy. In its range, in its analyses of many philosophers not discussed elsewhere, and in revealing the subtle interweaving of religious and political thought with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the evolution of Kant's ethics. (shrink)

This book presents the first detailed history of the modern passport and why it became so important for controlling movement in the modern world. It explores the history of passport laws, the parliamentary debates about those laws, and the social responses to their implementation. The author argues that modern nation-states and the international state system have 'monopolized the 'legitimate means of movement',' rendering persons dependent on states' authority to move about - especially, though not exclusively, across international boundaries. This new (...) edition reviews other scholarship, much of which was stimulated by the first edition, addressing the place of identification documents in contemporary life. It also updates the story of passport regulations from the publication of the first edition, which appeared just before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to the present day. (shrink)

We live in a world made by science. How and when did this happen? This book tells the story of the extraordinary intellectual and cultural revolution that gave birth to modern science, and mounts a major challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of its history. David Wootton's landmark book changes our understanding of how this great transformation came about, and of what science is.

In this sweeping new history of humanity, told through the prism of our ever-changing moral norms and values, Hanno Sauer shows how modern society is just the latest step in the long evolution of good and evil and everything in between. What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes (...) at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose--and why we need them. We humans were born to cooperate, but everywhere we find ourselves in conflict. The way we live together has changed fundamentally in recent decades: global mobility, demographic upheaval, migration movements, and digital networking, have all called the moral foundations of human communities into question. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share. If we understand the origin of our morality, we can understand its future too. With philosophical expertise and empirical data, Sauer explains how processes of biological, cultural, social, and historical evolution shaped the moral grammar that defines our present. Seven chapters recount the crucial moral upheavals of human history showing how the emergence of humankind five million years ago, the rise of first civilizations 5,000 years ago, and the dynamics of moral progress in the last fifty years are interrelated. This genealogical perspective allows us, on the one hand, to see the contradictions and potential conflicts of our moral identities; on the other, it makes clear that we share fundamental values that apply to all human beings at all times. Sauer's elegant prose, translated into English by Jo Heinrich, brings the history of humanity to vivid new life. (shrink)

This book covers Husserl’s stance on the philosopher and the history of philosophy, whether or not such a history is part of the philosophical attitude itself, and if so, how Husserl’s phenomenology might weigh in on such matters. Firstly, this text spells out some of the manifold ways in which the history of philosophy works its way in Husserl’s phenomenology, showing how concepts, methods and problems drawn from various Ancient and Modern philosophical traditions (Platonism, Aristotelianism, Sophistry, Stoicism, Scholasticism, Modern Rationalism) (...) are transformed and embedded within transcendental phenomenology itself. Secondly, it shows how a better understanding of the distinctive patterns by means of which Husserl’s phenomenology confronts the history of philosophy could be extremely significant for historians of philosophy who are interested in learning something entirely new about the unexplored horizons of such concepts, methods and problems. Finally, based on such twofold historical and philosophical approach and thanks to a substantial reinterpretation of some key phenomenological concepts such as “multiplicity”, “constitution”, “attitude” and “variation”, this book provides a novel and original reading of Husserl’s overall philosophical project in its full meaning and scope. By doing so, this volume appeals to both students and researchers and critically engages in mainstream interpretations of phenomenology, suggesting a unique take on the idea of transcendental phenomenology as a whole. (shrink)

In this article we pose three questions: 1) What are the questions that gave rise to the introduction of the concept and subdiscipline of meta-ethics? 2) What characterises the view of meta-ethics as a subdiscipline of moral philosophy? And 3) is it in fact possible to uphold a systematic distinction between normative moral philosophy and meta-ethics in a way that allows us to see these two aspects of moral philosophy as independent subdisciplines? In trying to answer these questions, we trace (...) two different roads in the shaping of the current understanding of meta-ethics: the introduction of the word in analytical moral philosophy and the characterisation of meta-ethics in the formative period of meta-ethics and in contemporary introductions. Among the characteristics ascribed to meta-ethics, we identify a special focus on normative neutrality, and we furthermore show that this idea of neutrality as the defining characteristic of meta-ethics cannot be upheld. Our aim is to show that meta-ethics cannot be characterised or construed in a way that is normatively neutral and independent of other work done in normative ethics. We therefore challenge the claim that meta-ethics makes up a subdiscipline that is independent of other work done in moral philosophy. Instead, we suggest a reflective view of the relationship between meta-ethics and normative ethics, according to which we should acknowledge that meta-ethics is inherently normative, and that meta-ethical questions are interwoven with normative questions in moral philosophy. (shrink)

The Interface Theory of Perception, as stated by D. Hoffman, says that perceptual experiences do not to approximate properties of an “objective” world; instead, they have evolved to provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to the world. Conscious Realism states that the objective world consists of ‘conscious agents’ and their experiences. Under these two theses, consciousness creates all objects and properties of the physical world: the problem of explaining this process reverses the mind-body problem. In support of the interface theory (...) I propose that our perceptions have evolved, not to report the truth, but to guide adaptive behaviors. Using evolutionary game theory, I state a theorem asserting that perceptual strategies that see the truth will, under natural selection, be driven to extinction by perceptual strategies of equal complexity but tuned instead to fitness. I then give a minimal mathematical definition of the essential elements of a “conscious agent.” Under the conscious realism thesis, this leads to a non-dualistic, dynamical theory of conscious process in which both observer and observed have the same mathematical structure. The dynamics raises the possibility of emergence of combinations of conscious agents, in whose experiences those of the component agents are entangled. In support of conscious realism, I discuss two more theorems showing that a conscious agent can consistently see geometric and probabilistic structures of space that are not necessarily in the world per se but are properties of the conscious agent itself. The world simply has to be amenable to such a construction on the part of the agent; and different agents may construct different structures as seeming to belong to the world. This again supports the idea that any true structure of the world is likely quite different from what we see. I conclude by observing that these theorems suggest the need for a new theory which resolves the reverse mind-body problem, a good candidate for which is conscious agent theory. (shrink)

This article aims to introduce English-speaking readers to a still little-known tradition of French philosophy of technology: the “biological philosophy of technology.” As recognized by Georges Canguilhem, this philosophy was initiated by Henri Bergson, who conceived of technology as an extension of life, which in its evolution, creates natural tools (organs) and artificial ones (technical objects). The paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan took up this thesis and put it to the test of archaeological data to demonstrate, on the one hand, the biological (...) basis of technical evolution and on the other hand, the importance of technics for human evolution. Finally, Gilbert Simondon extended Leroi-Gourhan’s scientific technology from the study of tools to that of machines, providing yet another fruitful example of the biological philosophy of technology. (shrink)

In treating human nature as a ‘moral entity’, imposed by God for reasons into which man could have no direct insight, Samuel Pufendorf reconfigured the architecture of natural law thought in a fundamental way. For this meant that rather than deducing norms from a nature in which they had been embedded by God and could be discerned by self-reflective reason, man had to derive them by observing the requirements of the exigent condition in which he happened to find himself; and (...) it further meant that such observation would be gathered via erudite citation of humanist authorities, rather than from philosophical reflection or introspection. As a result of this reconstruction, Pufendorfian natural law was opened to the normative structure of historically existing juridical-constitutional orders, for which it supplied both a propaedeutic and an abstract rationale. At the same time, however, theological and philosophical forms of natural law, based on normative moral anthropologies, continued unabated, this giving rise to a partitioning of the field into an introspective philosophy of law, and an observational legal humanism. (shrink)

It is only in the early decades of the twentieth century that the “Hobbesian state of nature” and the “discourse of anarchy” came to be seen as virtually synonymous. In examining Hobbes’ international state of nature, this article rejects two common views. In one, International Relations is seen as a warlike “Hobbesian” anarchy, and in the other, Hobbes is regarded as the progenitor of Realism. Far from defending anarchy of states, Hobbes in fact constructs a largely ameliorative international arena.

In Inventing Temperature, Chang takes a historical and philosophical approach to examine how scientists were able to use scientific method to test the reliability of thermometers; how they measured temperature beyond the reach of thermometers; and how they came to measure the reliability and accuracy of these instruments without a circular reliance on the instruments themselves. Chang discusses simple epistemic and technical questions about these instruments, which in turn lead to more complex issues about the solutions that were developed.

In the Introduction to this volume, we pointed out the difficulties of a research that intends to explore the relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy guided by Husserl’s problematic account of philosophy itself. Faced with such difficulties, we then decided to “sidestep” Husserl’s daunting question “why does the philosopher need the history of philosophy?” (with its threefold answer and quite demanding conceptuality) and replace it with two more accessible questions. These alternative questions (“when and how did Husserl need (...) the history of philosophy?”; “why should historians of philosophy care about Husserl’s phenomenology?”) did not require any previous assessment of Husserl’s phenomenology or any commitment to its underlying assumptions. They required, instead, the willingness to establish the singularity, the novelty and the fruitfulness of Husserl’s actual engagement with the concepts, methods and problems of the philosophical tradition and its historical development. Thanks to this “circumvention strategy”, so to speak, we have then been able to provide a tentative, Aquinas-like introduction to the investigations carried out in this volume—albeit in reverse. We first saw how concepts such as “unity” and “multiplicity”, drawn from the Platonic tradition, structure the project—both eidetic and transcendental—of Husserlian phenomenology, and form the backbone of the idea of “attitude”, which, in turn, is essential for thinking the unity of phenomenology and of philosophy (Part I). We then observed how, in confronting the conceptuality of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, Husserl addresses the problem of the unity of ontology, and defines the “analytically rigorous” idea of “ontological region,” which, again, is necessary to think the correlation of the two Ur-regionen, “world” and “consciousness” (Part II). We have also examined how a still unexplored side of modernity—Cartesian, post-Leibnizian, and Kantian—provides Husserl with the concepts of “variation” and “productive imagination” enabling phenomenology to establish, in trying to overcome them, the eidetic limits of such regions (Part III). Moving then to the sphere of formal ontology, we paused to consider the way in which Husserl conceives the correlation between the formal categories of “being” and “meaning”, engaging, at once, with Aristotelianism and Platonism, but ultimately choosing the Stoic path of the “something” (τι) and the “expressible sense” (λεκτόν) (Part IV). We finally focused, at length, on Husserl’s “poetical invention” of the history of philosophy as the ongoing realization of an “infinite task”, its manifold beginnings (the Presocratic’s new “attitude” towards the “all of the world”, Plato’s institution of the “idea” of genuine philosophy, Descartes’s “radicalization” thereof) and missed opportunities (Gorgias’s unheared transcendental “joke”) (Part V). It is my hope that, having sidestepped the “daunting question”, all these investigations might have finally shown not only that a better understanding of the history of philosophy contributes to the discovery of neglected aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology, but also that a better understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology contributes to the discovery of neglected aspects of the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Generally attributed to Duns Scotus, as the correlate of formal distinction, and as the minimal component of being, the concept of reality is older than that. It arose during the twelfth century, u...

L'être humain est un vivant particulier. Il va de soi pour lui que le monde existe et que ce monde, parce qu'il est réel, juge nos paroles, nos actes et nos convictions. Le vivant humain est «réaliste» : il croit à un monde plus vieux que lui et qui lui survivra. Comment une telle croyance a-t-elle pu advenir? Comment le réalisme s'est-il inventé dans l'histoire de la vie? A cette question la philosophie a fourni, au long de son histoire, un (...) ensemble de réponses très diverses. L'être humain croit que le monde existe parce qu'il est un être parlant, ou un vivant déficient, ou un animal politique, etc. Mais que valent ces réponses lorsqu'on les examine et qu'on les discute pour elles-mêmes? Et comment se défendent-elles, lorsqu'on les soumet au crible d'une enquête empirique appuyée sur l'éthologie animale, la psychologie de l'enfant ou la psycholinguistique? C'est ainsi que le réalisme, dès lors qu'il s'entend comme une attitude tard venue dans l'histoire de la vie, somme la philosophie de repenser à nouveaux frais ses partages fondateurs : le réalisme et l'idéalisme, le transcendantal et l'empirique, l'universel et le nécessaire... (shrink)

Much ink has been spilled to explain why Darwin avoided publishing his views for many years. Although a general consensus was never achieved on any one reason, not much doubt has been raised as to the existence of such a delay. In this article I argue that there was no delay. Darwin published his views as soon as he developed a defensible theory. I argue that the appearance of a delay emerged as a consequence of reading Darwin out of context. (...) Once we distinguish what would constitute a satisfactory account of transmutation for Darwin from what it would be for us, there will be no plausible case to argue that Darwin delayed publication. (shrink)

One of the most startlingly original and provocatively radical scholars currently engaged in the study of culture and the concept of race.

The Perils of Invention is based on three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences: "Human Being in an Inhuman Age," "Lying and Politics," and "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts." Contributions written for these conferences are placed alongside many new essays that reflect on the ideas they raised. The result is a freshly invigorated investigation into these critical and timely themes. The authors have diverse backgrounds--Arendt scholars, public intellectuals, novelists, journalists, and business people--and include Uday Mehta, Marrianne Constable, Nicholson Baker, (...) George Kateb, Marianne Constable, Linda M.G. Zerilli, Peg Birmingham, Davide Panagia, and many others. (shrink)

This essay explores clover as an instance of how seventeenth-century English botany fashioned an episteme of natural nationhood in the same era that England was becoming an empire. As poets and preachers joined naturalists, husbandmen, and colonial projectors to define a collective English nature through the wild plants found in the nation’s heaths and meadows, this unassuming groundcover came to embody an innate, common, and portable national character. As authors of all stripes sorted what (and who) belonged on English soil (...) from what should be eradicated, they classified clover as a national treasure and declared it critical to England’s flourishing both at home and abroad. Their texts proliferated through the public sphere of cheap print to shape the popular imagination in an era when England was flooded by strangers and strange objects, while English ships sailed across the Atlantic carrying grass seeds to transform the nature of America. (shrink)

As AI increasingly drives discovery, the concept of inventor faces severe strain. Recent judicial decisions, such as the Swiss Federal Administrative Court’s 2025 DABUS ruling, expose a deepening tension: courts demand intellectual creation by a natural person even as human contributions to AI-assisted discovery become increasingly nominal. This paper approaches the resulting tension from the standpoint of political philosophy rather than jurisprudence: the strain AI places on the concept of inventorship is too fundamental to be resolved by interpretative methods taking (...) existing conceptual architectures for granted. Inspired by Hume’s genealogy of property, the paper reconstructs the historical “need matrices” that forged the concept of inventorship, tracing its evolution from Venetian guild economics through Romantic genius ideology to corporate R&D. This reveals the concept to be an overburdened bundle serving four social functions: incentivising innovation, disseminating knowledge, legitimating monopolies, and resolving priority disputes. It also clarifies the mismatch between the concept and the emerging realities of AI-driven discovery. To resolve this mismatch, we must disaggregate the concept of inventorship and develop specialised conceptual resources for each of these functions. If we invented the notion of inventor to perform certain functions, we can reinvent it to perform them better. (shrink)

Artificial insemination and other fertilization techniques are today considered central to the history of reproductive medicine. The medical treatment of infertile couples, however, constitutes just a small part of the whole story of artificial fertilization. Lazzaro Spallanzani in particular, said to have been the inventor of artificial insemination, did not develop this method for medical purposes. He belonged to a generation of naturalists to whom artificial insemination was part of a heterogeneous series of investigations that were undertaken to explore the (...) natural history of animal generation. Questions concerning conception, the role of the gametes, the definition of species, the production of hybrids or livestock breeding were all included in these investigations. Thus, no one strain of thought, nor single set of ideas or interests, entirely shaped the development of artificial fertilization. (shrink)

This article considers the notion of an event, of something happening to language, through a reading of Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other. In particular, the issues of language, translation and the untranslatable are linked to the three forms of madness that Derrida distinguishes. The paper, in turn, contends that there are only target languages, or again, that all languages are in fact target languages, languages-to-come, and that this experience of language is the only test worthy of the untranslatable. The (...) madness of language is thus associated with the singularity of not only every language and every speaker, but also with the non-programmable character of language. The literature of Kafka and Celan, among others, is henceforth invoked as exemplary, and examined as both an intra-lingual and inter-lingual event. The overall aim is to disrupt the Globish of global communication and the nationalism of linguistic proprietorship. (shrink)

This article sketches an archaeology of the racial divide between North Africa and “Black Africa” by examining how it belongs to the emergence of modern geography during the nineteenth century. It argues that the de-Africanization of North Africa is inseparable from the racial identi????ication of “Africa proper”—to quote Hegel’s word—with a dehumanizing concept of Blackness. The second part of the article tries to move beyond archaeology in order to analyze counter-geographies of decolonization. It does so by focussing on the ways (...) in which the continental Pan-Africanism of the Algerian revolution has deployed a practical criticism of the divide between North and Black Africa through Fanon. (shrink)

Psyche: Inventions of the Other is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. Advancing his reflection on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion, Volume II also carries on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: De Certeau, Heidegger, Kant, Lacoue-Labarthe, Mandela, Rosenszweig, and Shakespeare, among others. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal (...) essays (for example, "Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference," "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand," "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," and " Interpretations at War : Kant, the Jew, the German"). (shrink)

This chapter asserts that Staël’s liberal political thought represents, above all, a pragmatic application of an important political concept in Enlightenment philosophy, namely, moderation. I briefly present how Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu and Hume dealt with this unique concept before it turned into a pragmatic debate on the second chamber on the eve of the French Revolution. After 1789, the concept remained important among left-wing moderates. While Staël oscillated between revolution and moderation under constitutional monarchy, she was among a (...) few left-wing moderates who insisted upon the importance of institutionalizing elements of moderation such as the strengthened executive and constitution of the intermediate ranks in order to secure liberty in terms of security. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:...

The Catholic philosopher Ivan Illich is the foremost heterodox voice in energy studies. This chapter explores his idea that modern energy services only liberate us up to a certain point. After that threshold, we become shackled with more needs as energy slaves become our masters. The chapter relates this insight to psychological research on shifting baseline syndrome and the hedonic treadmill, as well as empirical social studies of energy that show happiness reaches a saturation point beyond which more energy brings, (...) at best, diminishing marginal returns. A concluding section considers the relationships between energy and equity. (shrink)

‘이타주의’(altruism)는 프랑스 사회학자 오귀스트 콩트가 만든 신조어로, 영국 식자층에 알려진 것은 19세기 중반이다. 귀납주의적 사회과학의 모델을 옹립하려 했던 전기사상과 달리, 콩트의 후기사상은 ‘인륜교’라는 새로운 도덕을 설파하는 데 집중되었다. 영국 도덕철학계에서 이타주의라는 신조어의 도입은 이 후기사상의 수용 과정과 밀접하게 결부되어 있으며, 사회학과 경제학 사이의 방법론 논쟁과도 연결되어 있다. 사회학과 경제학이라는 두 가지 사회과학 모델의 격돌은 윤리학의 자율성에 대한 새로운 인식의 지적 배경이 되었다. 현대 메타-윤리학의 등장은 19세기 도덕철학자들의 학술적 성과에 힘입었지만, 그것이 학문적 발명으로 자리매김할 수 있었던 것은 사상계의 전반적 지각 변동이 (...) 수반되었기 때문이다. 본 논문에서 필자는 ‘이타주의’의 등장과 보급 과정을 통해 메타-윤리학이 등장할 수 있었던 영국 사회과학계의 지각 변동을 기술하고자 한다. 자신이 공리주의자임을 공개적으로 천명한 인물에는 제번스나 에지워스 같은 경제학자도 있었지만, 스펜서와 같은 사회학자도 있었다. 빅토리아 시대에 공리주의는 경제학과 사회학의 방법론적 갈등에 이미 휘말려 있었고, 그 영향으로 도덕 이론의 성격이 강한 윤리학으로 전개되었음을 보게 될 것이다. (shrink)

Before being a saint, Thomas Aquinas was a skillful professor and an expert reader. Indeed, according to some (though this is definitely a matter of dispute), he was canonized as a saint precisely because he was a skillful professor and an expert reader—two talents which today, in the age of PowerPoint teaching and scholarship with searchable PDFs, would hardly enable anyone to land a tenured position. Oblivious to all that, Aquinas, in his commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, went on to (...) provide his clueless Parisian students with a lesson in (un)creative writing, teaching them “the three things that should be done in any introduction”. (shrink)

Programming languages have developed significantly over the past century to provide complex models to think about and describe the world and processes of computation. Out of Alan Kay’s Smalltalk and a number of earlier languages, object-oriented programming has emerged as a preeminent mode of writing and organizing programs. Tracing the history of object-oriented programming from its origins in Simula and Sketchpad through Smalltalk, particularly its philosophical and technical developments, offers unique insights into philosophical questions about objects, language, and our digital (...) technologies. These early attempts to understand objects as basic elements of computation demonstrate the ways in which language, while firmly planted in the material reality of computation, must delimit objects from each other. This essay critically explores this history and explicates a theory of objects suggested by the development of object-oriented programming languages, which insists on the importance of language for representing and delimiting objects. It argues that the philosophies behind object-oriented programming are ultimately opposed to the claims of object-oriented ontology and find themselves more closely allied with philosophies that insist on the mediation of what exists through language. (shrink)

This publishes the Taubman Lectures for September 2013. The aim of the book is to trace the reception of the Torah from the Babylonian...