In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 560-561 [Access article in PDF] Olli Koistinen and John Biro, editors. Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 255. Cloth, $49.95. Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, Spinoza tried to provide conceptual foundations for the newly developing "natural philosophy" of his day. His monism, naturalism, and theory of mind are still intriguing today, but they are notoriously (...) difficult to understand. There is little interpretive consensus with regard to even the most basic concepts and claims. In Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes the diversity of interpretive perspective is vividly on display.All of the eleven essays in this collection are published here for the first time. They cover a broad range of topics and, taken together, they move us forward in our understanding of Spinoza's basic doctrines. Most of the essays are carefully argued discussions of clearly defined issues of interpretation. They address matters that are central to the system and central to our understanding of the system—monism, causation, individuation, conatus.The editors' Introduction claims that Jonathan Bennett's 1986 work set a new standard of Spinoza scholarship—a standard that the essays in this volume seek to measure up to. Most (not all) of these essays do indeed come close to Bennett's commendable level of argumentative clarity and rigor. And here, as in Bennett's work, the emphasis is mostly systematic and argumentative, not historical.The collection opens with a very good essay by Michael Della Rocca entitled "Spinoza's Substance Monism." This essay applies to the thorny issue of substance monism the same argumentative strategy that Della Rocca has elsewhere applied to monism regarding individual modes—i.e., to the claim that an extended mode and the idea of that mode are identical. The argument turns on the complete conceptual independence of the attributes, and Della Rocca makes a strong case for the centrality of that somewhat puzzling doctrine. John Carriero's contribution ("Monism in Spinoza") continues the focus on monism, but from a different perspective. Carriero asks, "Why does Spinoza hold that finite... bodies [End Page 560] are not substances?" (47). Rejecting two traditional responses he provides a plausible answer to this good question by focusing on an early exchange of letters between Spinoza and Oldenburg and upon Spinoza's rethinking of Descartes's conception of extension.One of the most interesting essays is Don Garrett's interpretive discussion of Spinoza's derivation of the conatus doctrine at Ethics3p4-3p6 ("Spinoza's Conatus Argument"). Commentators have identified various putative fallacies in the argument that Spinoza offers for this doctrine—chiefly fallacies of equivocation. Garrett develops an interesting and plausible notion of "inherence" that casts light on a number of central metaphysical relations and permits a defensible reading of the conatus argument. For the serious Spinoza scholar, this one essay is worth the price of the volume.Olli Koistinen's "Causation in Spinoza" considers Spinoza's solution to the difficulty of causal interaction between substances—a glaring problem in Descartes that provoked glaringly problematic solutions from Malebranche and Leibniz. Richard Manning's essay addresses a controversial point in Jonathan Bennett's interpretation. The issue is whether, in Spinoza's system, mental content can have causal significance—a point closely related to the important issue of teleological explanation of human behavior. Manning supports a kind of "thoughtful teleology," making a convincing case for the causal efficacy of mental content.On the whole the authors in this volume restrict their discussion of secondary literature to the works of fellow Anglophones. One finds occasional mention of Gueroult, but the Continental literature on Spinoza is mostly ignored. There are two notable exceptions to this rule. Steven Barbone ("What Counts as an Individual for Spinoza?") discusses the thorny issue of modal individuation in Spinoza's system, arguing against Matheron's 1969 claim that for Spinoza the state is an individual. Emphasizing the centrality of power, Barbone draws important (liberal) political conclusions from his analysis of individuation. Mark Kulstad ("Leibniz, Spinoza and Tschirnhaus: Metaphysics à Trois, 1675-1676") fruitfully uses recent Continental work on... (shrink)

Williams, Elster and Pears hold that an effort to induce in oneself a belief in the truth of some proposition that one believes to be false can succeed only if one manages, somewhere along the way, to forget that one is engaged in such an effort. Although this view has strong intuitive appeal, it is false, and in this paper it is shown to be false by example.

According to Colerus, Spinoza replied affirmatively when his landlady asked if she "...could be saved in her faith." This paper asks what Spinoza could have meant -- and what his landlady would have thought he meant. She was asking about salvation of a certain kind -- a kind that Spinoza did not in fact believe to be possible. When he talks about salvation in his writings, he has in mind a different kind of salvation -- one that his landlady will (...) certainly not achieve "in her faith." So, when he assured her that she could be saved in her faith was he simply lying to her? This question is explored against the background of the controversies regarding Spinoza's sincerity in the Tractatus Theologico-politicus. (shrink)

In the introductory chapter to this collection, the editors point out that, until recently, most Anglophone Spinoza scholarship has been focused on the metaphysics and epistemology of the Ethics. But according to Kisner and Youpa, Spinoza thought that metaphysics and epistemology were significant chiefly because they are required for understanding the more important part of his project—the ethical doctrine developed in the last three parts of the work. Ethica was so-titled because it is a book about ethics.In recent years, the (...) scholarly community has begun to shift its attention to bring itself more in line with Spinoza's intentions—to focus more directly on his ethical views. The volume under review presents... (shrink)

"No, your honor. I didn't know who or what he was when I first came across the book -- they don't exactly love him in the synagogue, if you've read the story of his life. I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a kopek, and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I (...) say, I didn't understand every word but when you're dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch's ride. After that I wasn't the same man. That's in a manner of speaking, of course, because I've changed little since my youth.". The speaker is Yakov Bok, the unlikely hero of Bernard Malamud's The Fixer. At this point, early in the novel, Yakov speaks truthfully when he says that he has changed little since his youth. But over the next two and a half years (the time-period covered in the novel), he will undergo profound change and impressive moral growth. He suffers; he learns; he grows. Spinoza's name and ideas appear again and again at crucial moments in the course of the hero's moral development. Yakov Bok's verbal account of Spinoza's ideas is often comically primitive, but his understanding far outstrips his ability to articulate. By the end of the novel, his sufferings have led him to a deep grasp of certain of Spinoza's ethical and political doctrines. (shrink)

In Göttliche Gedanken (Godly Thoughts), Andreas Schmidt provides an in-depth discussion of the metaphysics of knowledge and of mind in four early-modern rationalists: Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz. His topic overlaps with what is called “philosophy of mind” in contemporary Anglo-American circles, for he is quite interested in the relation between mind and body in these four historical thinkers. But as Schmidt effectively reminds us, the “mind-body problem” looks entirely different when embedded in the conceptual setting of the seventeenth century. (...) In Schmidt’s reading, reflection on mind at that time begins with reflection on knowledge and our capacity to know. What must the mind be in order for us .. (shrink)

Review of Daniel Cook, Hartmut Rudolph, and Christoph Schulte, editors. _Leibniz und das Judentum_. Studia Leibnitiana Sonderhefte, 34. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008. Pp. 283.

The recently published Cambridge Companion to Spinoza contains a fine essay by Pierre- Francois Moreau on Spinoza’s reception and on his influence during the more than three hundred years that have passed since his death. In Moreau’s twenty-five page article we find a brief paragraph on the novelist George Eliot and half a sentence on Ed Curley. There is not another mention, at all, of any other philosopher from an English-speaking land since the seventeenth century – nothing on how Spinoza’s (...) ideas were received in England, North America or Australia. Not a word on any influence that Spinoza might have had on later thinkers in those countries. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

This paper proposes that managers add an attention to virtues and vices of human character as a full complement to moral reasoning according to a deontological focus on obligations to act and a teleological focus on consequences (a balanced tripartite approach). Even if the criticisms of virtue ethics cloud its use as a mononomic normative theory of justification, they do not refute the substantial benefits of applying a human character perspective – when done so in conjunction with also-imperfect act-oriented perspectives. (...) An interactive tripartite approach is superior for meeting the complex requirements of an applied ethic. To illustrate how deficiencies of a "strong" virtue ethics formulation can be overcome by a balanced tripartite approach, this paper compares normative leadership paradigms (each based on a combination of virtue, deontology, or consequentialist perspectives) and the dangers inherent in each. The preferred paradigm is servant leadership, grounded in a tripartite ethic. Effective application of such an ethics approach in contemporary organizations requires further empirical research to develop a greater understanding of the moral language actually used. Meeting this challenge will allow academics better to assist practicing managers lead moral development and moral reasoning efforts. (shrink)

Who a manager is, as a person of moral character, has been only of tangential interest in social science definitions of management, which have focused on functions, roles, behaviors, and environmental influences. But how do managers themselves speak of managerial excellence? This paper answers this for a particular corporation, based on a three-phased research process that deliberately imposes no descriptive or normative categories, but allows the answer to emerge, listening to what managers themselves say when discussing excellent managers and their (...) behaviors. This approach finds that: (1) virtue ethics and virtue language is fluently used by practicing managers, (2) virtue language is important to understanding managerial excellence, and (3) whereas the set of virtues defining the excellent manager can be expected to be dependent on the societal, industry, and organizational context, such a set of manager virtues can be identified and prioritized within a particular organizational milieu. The implication is that, once an organization's management better understands the meaning of the excellent manager in terms of the virtue language already used by its own employees, it is better equipped to implement a practical ethic of virtues, one helpful toward recognizing and developing excellent managers. Ethics researchers are challenged to increase their understanding of extant virtue language as the basis for a renewed development of virtue ethics theory and applications. (shrink)

After briefly describing the philosophy of personalism this article assesses each of three normative leadership paradigms (transformational leadership, postmodern or postindustrial leadership, and servant leadership) in terms of five major themes of this phenomenological philosophy. Servant leadership appears to be closest to personalism. The critical ingredient for servant leadership is also personalism’s starting point, i.e. the dignity of each human person. A genuine servant leader works with his followers in building a community of participation and solidarity. However, some claim that (...) servant leaders are subject to manipulation by their followers. If so, and if transformational leaders, when too successful, gain too much power or manipulate using bogus empowerment, a superior approach might be provided by a combination in which a morally tough servant leader adopts certain transforming behaviors of Bass’s altruistic transformational leader. The leader and the followers would focus on a jointly formulated and refined vision, avoiding manipulation by any party through a mutual commitment to participation, solidarity of community, and respect for each person. (shrink)

After briefly describing the philosophy of personalism this article assesses each of three normative leadership paradigms in terms of five major themes of this phenomenological philosophy. Servant leadership appears to be closest to personalism. The critical ingredient for servant leadership is also personalism’s starting point, i.e. the dignity of each human person. A genuine servant leader works with his followers in building a community of participation and solidarity. However, some claim that servant leaders are subject to manipulation by their followers. (...) If so, and if transformational leaders, when too successful, gain too much power or manipulate using bogus empowerment, a superior approach might be provided by a combination in which a morally tough servant leader adopts certain transforming behaviors of Bass’s altruistic transformational leader. The leader and the followers would focus on a jointly formulated and refined vision, avoiding manipulation by any party through a mutual commitment to participation, solidarity of community, and respect for each person. (shrink)

Rapid advances in the domain of science and technology are having an unprecedented effect upon the provision of higher education in universities throughout the world, the pace of change often being so fast as to make planning for the development of the “classroom of the future” an extremely difficult task. The Mobile Multimedia University (MMU) project, a collaborative action between four leading UK based research facilities, has been established to investigate these issues. Included amongst its aims is the use of (...) novel research methodologies to determine the factors which will influence the shape and form of future education provision, and thus the distribution of knowledge to society, such as mobility, telecommunications and multimedia services. This paper describes the use of a Delphi survey in predicting the technological trends and innovations which will affect university education in the near future. It describes the theory underpinning the Delphi method, illustrating this with examples of how such a technique has been successfully used in the past. It then details the specific application of the Delphi approach within the current MMU research project, detailing the preliminary results and discussing the implications of these findings for the future of universities and other institutes of higher education. (shrink)

On the horizon between metaphysics and philosophy of religion stands the question of God’s relation to various abstracta. Like other contemporary philosophical debates, this one has resulted in a broadly dichotomous stalemate between Platonic realists on the one hand and varieties of nominalism/antirealism on the other. In this paper, I offer Aquinas’s moderaterealism as a true middle ground between realist or nominalist solutions. What Platonists take to be abstracta are actually the result of intellect’s abstractive work on sensible objects. Further, (...) the Christian philosopher should be concerned as much, if not more so, by nominalism than by Platonism. Given the problems associated with either Platonist or nominalist solutions, one should be open to a Thomistic moderate-realist solution to the problem of God and abstracta. (shrink)

One thing that becomes apparent in this exchange is that each of the positions emerges based on differences in fundamental philosophical commitments. An existential Thomist has a very well-defined and sufficiently “thick” view of being at the heart of his metaphysical system. Van Inwagen rejects such views of being in favor of a “thin” view. This issue is addressed and clarified. Craig takes issue with the way the term “moderate-realism” has been explicated, whether or not the idea of existence in (...) the intellect is coherent, and whether the Thomistic solution offers any real advantages over nominalist ones. In this response, I continue to demonstrate the cogency and advocate the superiority of Aquinas’s position. (shrink)

We developed and tested a behavioral version of the Defining Issues Test-1 revised (DIT-1r), which is a measure of the development of moral judgment. We conducted a behavioral experiment using the behavioral Defining Issues Test (bDIT) to examine the relationship between participants’ moral developmental status, moral competence, and reaction time when making moral judgments. We found that when the judgments were made based on the preferred moral schema, the reaction time for moral judgments was significantly moderated by the moral developmental (...) status. In addition, as a participant becomes more confident with moral judgment, the participant differentiates the preferred versus other schemas better particularly when the participant’s abilities for moral judgment are more developed. (shrink)

How are we to make sense of madness and psychosis? For most of us the words conjure up images from television and newspapers of seemingly random, meaningless violence. It is something to be feared, something to be left to the experts. But is madness best thought of as a medical condition? Psychiatrists and the drug industry maintain that psychoses are brain disorders amenable to treatment with drugs, but is this actually so? There is no convincing evidence that the brain is (...) disordered in psychosis, yet governments across the world are investing huge sums of money on mental health services that take for granted the idea that psychosis is an illness to be treated with medication. Although some people who use mental health services find medication helpful, many do not, and resist the idea that their experiences are symptoms of illnesses like schizophrenia. Consequently they are forced into having treatment against their wishes. So, how do we make sense of this situation? Postpsychiatry addresses these questions. It involves an attempt to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions of mental health work, showing how recent developments in philosophy and ethics can help us to clarify some of the dilemmas and conflicts around different understandings of madness. Throughout, the authors examine the conflicting ways in which politicians, academics, and mental health professionals appear to understand madness, and contrast this with voices and experiences that are usually excluded - those of the people who use mental health services. They then examine the power of psychiatry to shape how we understand ourselves and our emotions, before considering some of the basic limitations of psychiatry as science to make madness meaningful. In the final section of the book they draw on evidence from service users and survivors, the humanities and anthropology, to point out a new direction for mental health practice. This new direction emphasises the importance of cultural contexts in understanding madness, placing ethics before technology in responding to madness, and minimising 'therapeutic' coercion. (shrink)

The integrins are receptors for proteins of the extracellular matrix, both providing a physical link to the cytoskeleton and transducing signals from the extracellular matrix. Activation of integrins leads to tyrosine and serine phosphorylation of a number of proteins, elevation of cytosolic calcium levels, cytoplasmic alkalinization, changes in phospholipid metabolism and, ultimately, changes in gene expression. The recently discovered focal adhesion kinase localizes to focal contacts, which are sites of integrin clustering, and focal adhesion kinase can physically associate with integrins (...) in vitro. As integrins lack intrinsic catalytic activity, focal adhesion kinase is a candidate for a signaling molecule that is recruited by integrins in order to trigger the generation of intracellular second messengers. Thus, focal adhesion kinase may play a central role in signal transduction through integrins. (shrink)

Can poem and picture collaborate successfully in a composite art of text and design? Or does one art inevitably dominate the other? W.J.T. Mitchell maintains that Blake's illuminated poems are an exception to Suzanne Langer's claim that "there are no happy marriages in art—only successful rape." Drawing on over one hundred reproductions of Blake's pictures, this book shows that neither the graphic nor the poetic aspect of his composite art consistently predominates: their relationship is more like an energetic rivalry, a (...) dialogue between vigorously independent modes of expression. W.J.T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art and Design at the University of Chicago and editor of Critical Inquiry. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Published in 1930, when Japan was struggling to define and assert its national and cultural identity, The Structure of Iki (Iki no kôzô) re-introduced the Japanese to a sophisticated tradition of urbane and spirited stylishness (iki) that was forged in the Edo period. Upon his return from Europe, Kuki Shûzô (1888–1941) made use of the new theoretical frameworks based on Western Continental methodology to redefine the significance of iki in Japanese society and culture. By applying Heidegger’s hermeneutics to this cultural (...) phenomenon, he attempted to recast traditional understanding in the context of Western aesthetic theory and reestablish the centrality of a purely Japanese sense of "taste." The three critical essays that accompany this new translation of The Structure of Iki look at various aspects of Kuki, his work, and the historical context that influenced his thinking. Hiroshi Nara first traces Kuki’s interest in a philosophy of life through his exposure to Husserl, Heidegger, and Bergson. In the second essay, J. Thomas Rimer compels readers to reexamine The Structure of Iki as a work in the celebrated tradition of zuihitsu (stream-of-consciousness writings) and takes into account French literary influences on Kuki. The philosopher’s controversial link with Heidegger is explored by Jon Mark Mikkelsen in the final essay. (shrink)

Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say 'no'. This distinction is practically important: additive axiologies support 'arguments from astronomical scale' which suggest (among other things) that it is overwhelmingly important for humanity to avoid premature extinction and ensure the existence of a (...) large future population, while non-additive axiologies need not. We show, however, that when there is a large enough 'background population' unaffected by our choices, a wide range of non-additive axiologies converge in their implications with some additive axiology -- for instance, average utilitarianism converges to critical-level utilitarianism and various egalitarian theories converge to prioritiarianism. We further argue that real-world background populations may be large enough to make these limit results practically significant. This means that arguments from astronomical scale, and other arguments in practical ethics that seem to presuppose additive separability, may be truth-preserving in practice whether or not we accept additive separability as a basic axiological principle. (shrink)