In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 14-30 [Access article in PDF] Mallarmé Contra Wagner Eric Gans I In early 1885, Edouard Dujardin wrote to Stéphane Mallarmé for a contribution to his newly founded Revue wagnérienne. Mallarmé, admitting that he had never seen--and perhaps never heard--anything of Wagner, replied to Dujardin in July that he was working on a "half article, half prose poem," and that "never has anything (...) seemed to me more difficult." 1 A month later, the Revue published a text, more prose poem than article, entitled "Richard Wagner, rêverie d'un poète français." 2Wagner was an increasingly obligatory reference for the French avant-garde after his death in 1883. But as far back as 1862, the 20-year-old Mallarmé, no doubt influenced by Baudelaire's enthusiastic groundbreaking article "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris" of the year before, had included Wagner along with Mozart and Beethoven in a group of three creators of the "mystery" of music, in a brief article entitled "Artistic Heresies: Art for Everyone." Characteristically enough, what fascinated the young Mallarmé was not music itself so much as the "signes sévères, chastes, inconnus" ("severe, chaste, unknown signs") (OC, p. 257) with which it was written, which give music the advantage over poetry--written in the universally understood alphabet--of being inaccessible to the uninitiated. This characteristic emphasis on writing over sound reappears in the "Hommage" sonnet for Wagner published in Dujardin's journal in January 1886, where Wagner's music is described as "mal tu par l'encre même en sanglots sibyllins" ("badly silenced by the ink itself in Sibylline sobs") (OC, p. 71). As we shall see, however, the relation between music and poetry suggested in "Art for Everyone" had by then been reversed. [End Page 14]Unlike most of his circle, Mallarmé was no Wagnerite; his "Rêverie," like his sonnet, expresses reluctant praise and reflects a certain professional jealousy. The theater had long been Mallarmé's chief preoccupation, as it had been for so many nineteenth-century writers who would be forced to make their reputation in other genres. The unfinished poem "Hérodiade," which occupied him throughout his life, took the form of a drama, and an early version of the "Après-midi d'un faune" had actually been presented to a theater director. References to music in Mallarmé's writings increase in number and specificity after 1885, and it is not unreasonable to assume that for him the prime representative of "music" in this period was Wagner. However much Mallarmé's own theater had become internalized and idealized, Wagner's theatrical success, as well as his near-deification by friends and disciples like Dujardin or Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, could not leave the poet indifferent. II What I would like to explore, however, is something more fundamental than the personal equation. Mallarmé's rivalry with Wagner over the theatrical center of culture is the rivalry of two arts and their respective means. What makes Mallarmé's critique of Wagner of particular interest is the exemplary rigor of the former's artistic intentions. Mallarmé's poems are a series of attempts to produce literary form with a minimum of figural content. Each poem has been submitted, so to speak, to Ockham's razor. The ultimate aim of this labor may be described as the discovery of the originary scene of poetry itself, the minimal sine qua non of representation, and therefore of humanity. 3 On the contrary, Wagner did not shrink from saturating the figural imagination in the pursuit of his totalizing aims. The confrontation reveals that musical maximalism in the service of national myth becomes a threat to what we may call, from Mallarmé's minimalist perspective, the anthropological mission of true art.Mallarmé held no particular brief for the theater of words; his tastes in performance went rather to the ballet, or to the mime-show, the subject of one of his most aesthetically interesting reflections. 4 Mallarmé anticipated 20th-century dramaturgy in seeing the theater not as a place for ratiocination and... (shrink)

Originary Thinking deals with generative anthropology, a radically new conception of human science founded on the hypothesis that humanity emerged in a communal event in which intraspecific violence was deferred by the production of a linguistic sign. The author pursues in the areas of religion, ethics, philosophy of language, theory of discourse, and aesthetics, the exploration begun in his The Origin of Language (1981) and continued in The End of Culture (1985) and Science and Faith (1990). The present volume adds (...) two significant new elements: (1) originary analysis-a methodology for rethinking the fundamental categories of the human in terms of the originary scene. On the basis of an originary model of aesthetic experience, the author presents an outline of Western aesthetic history from the classical era to the postmodern. The fundamental premise behind Originary Thinking is that the return to the specificity of a scene of origin is the necessary guarantee of openness in human science. (shrink)

Science and Faith explores the phenomenon of religious revelation in the light of the originary hypothesis, which postulates the origin of human language and culture in a unique event. It is the third in a series of works by the author, including The Origin of Language (1981) and The End of Culture (1985), that develop a generative anthropology founded on this hypothesis. After an introductory presentation of the hypothesis and its cultural consequences, the book discusses the two most significant instances (...) of revelation in the Judeo-Christian tradition: Moses' discovery of God's name on Mount Sinai, the inauguration of Hebrew monotheism, and Paul's vision on the road to Damascus, the founding event of Pauline Christianity. Moses' experience marks the inception, and Paul's the end, of revelation as the central Judeo-Christian discovery-procedure. The analysis of Christianity concludes with a discussion of the anthropological content of the doctrine of the Trinity. (shrink)

Starting from the minimal principle of generative anthropology - that human culture originates as 'the deferral of violence through representation' - the author proposes a new understanding of the fundamental concepts of metaphysics and an explanation of the historical problematic that underlies the postmodern 'end of culture.' Part I discusses the nature of paradox and the related notion of irony, as well as the fundamental concepts of being, thinking, and signification, leading to an anthropological interpretation of the origin of philosophy (...) and semiotics in Plato's Ideas. Part II develops the idea that material exchange originates in the sparagmos or violent rendering of the sacrificial victim from which each participant obtains a roughly equal portion. Examining the holocaust, the author demonstrates how postmodern dialogue becomes dominated by the rhetoric of victimage, and the culture of centrality gives way to an aesthetic of the marginal. (shrink)

The Scenic Imagination argues that the uniquely human phenomenon of representation, as manifested in language, art, and ritual, is a scenic event focused on a central object designated by a sign. The originary hypothesis posits the necessity of conceiving the origin of the human as such an event. In traditional societies, the scenic imagination through which this scene of origin is conceived manifests itself in sacred creation narratives. Modern thought is defined by the independent use of the scenic imagination to (...) create anthropological models of the origin of human institutions, beginning with the social contract scene in Hobbes’s Leviathan that puts an end to the reciprocal violence of the state of nature. Eric Gans follows the work of the scenic imagination in selected writings of twenty thinkers including Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Boas, and Freud and concludes his book with a critical examination of contemporary writing on the origins of religion and language. In the process, he demonstrates that the originary hypothesis offers the most cohesive explanation of the origin and function of these fundamental institutions. (shrink)

Rereading this piece written over forty years ago recalls for me the revelatory effect of La violence et le sacré when it appeared in 1972. From Mensonge romantique's theory of desire designed for the novel and its place in the moral history of the modern West—a point too often neglected by those who read it as an across-the-board description of human desire—René Girard waited a full eleven years before producing this seminal work, which proposed a radically new fundamental anthropology.My response (...) to this revelation took well over a decade to achieve its mature expression, and even The Origin of Language in 1981, which contained the first version of the originary hypothesis of human/language origin, did not yet... (shrink)

In 1960, in "The Problem of Method," which serves as the introduction not only to Critique of Dialectical Reason but to all of his recent work, Sartre enrolls himself solemnly under the banner of Marxism, which he considers the unsurpassable philosophy of our era. Today, a dozen years later, the Sartrean position has become open to challenge, it is true, because its deconstruction is underway, but it has not yet been dismissed as absurd. Existentialism, by immolating itself on the altar (...) of praxis, has taken with it phenomenology and the Existenzphilosophie that emerged from it. Heidegger, for example, can be read as the last defender of the bourgeois order fetishized as Being, forced by the triumphal march of the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 14-30 [Access article in PDF] Mallarmé Contra Wagner Eric Gans I In early 1885, Edouard Dujardin wrote to Stéphane Mallarmé for a contribution to his newly founded Revue wagnérienne. Mallarmé, admitting that he had never seen--and perhaps never heard--anything of Wagner, replied to Dujardin in July that he was working on a "half article, half prose poem," and that "never has anything (...) seemed to me more difficult." 1 A month later, the Revue published a text, more prose poem than article, entitled "Richard Wagner, rêverie d'un poète français." 2Wagner was an increasingly obligatory reference for the French avant-garde after his death in 1883. But as far back as 1862, the 20-year-old Mallarmé, no doubt influenced by Baudelaire's enthusiastic groundbreaking article "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris" of the year before, had included Wagner along with Mozart and Beethoven in a group of three creators of the "mystery" of music, in a brief article entitled "Artistic Heresies: Art for Everyone." Characteristically enough, what fascinated the young Mallarmé was not music itself so much as the "signes sévères, chastes, inconnus" ("severe, chaste, unknown signs") (OC, p. 257) with which it was written, which give music the advantage over poetry--written in the universally understood alphabet--of being inaccessible to the uninitiated. This characteristic emphasis on writing over sound reappears in the "Hommage" sonnet for Wagner published in Dujardin's journal in January 1886, where Wagner's music is described as "mal tu par l'encre même en sanglots sibyllins" ("badly silenced by the ink itself in Sibylline sobs") (OC, p. 71). As we shall see, however, the relation between music and poetry suggested in "Art for Everyone" had by then been reversed. [End Page 14]Unlike most of his circle, Mallarmé was no Wagnerite; his "Rêverie," like his sonnet, expresses reluctant praise and reflects a certain professional jealousy. The theater had long been Mallarmé's chief preoccupation, as it had been for so many nineteenth-century writers who would be forced to make their reputation in other genres. The unfinished poem "Hérodiade," which occupied him throughout his life, took the form of a drama, and an early version of the "Après-midi d'un faune" had actually been presented to a theater director. References to music in Mallarmé's writings increase in number and specificity after 1885, and it is not unreasonable to assume that for him the prime representative of "music" in this period was Wagner. However much Mallarmé's own theater had become internalized and idealized, Wagner's theatrical success, as well as his near-deification by friends and disciples like Dujardin or Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, could not leave the poet indifferent. II What I would like to explore, however, is something more fundamental than the personal equation. Mallarmé's rivalry with Wagner over the theatrical center of culture is the rivalry of two arts and their respective means. What makes Mallarmé's critique of Wagner of particular interest is the exemplary rigor of the former's artistic intentions. Mallarmé's poems are a series of attempts to produce literary form with a minimum of figural content. Each poem has been submitted, so to speak, to Ockham's razor. The ultimate aim of this labor may be described as the discovery of the originary scene of poetry itself, the minimal sine qua non of representation, and therefore of humanity. 3 On the contrary, Wagner did not shrink from saturating the figural imagination in the pursuit of his totalizing aims. The confrontation reveals that musical maximalism in the service of national myth becomes a threat to what we may call, from Mallarmé's minimalist perspective, the anthropological mission of true art.Mallarmé held no particular brief for the theater of words; his tastes in performance went rather to the ballet, or to the mime-show, the subject of one of his most aesthetically interesting reflections. 4 Mallarmé anticipated 20th-century dramaturgy in seeing the theater not as a place for ratiocination and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE: VIOLENCE DEFERRED OR VIOLENCE DENIED? Eric Gans University ofCalifornia—Los Angeles ~P ecently I was asked to review applicants at UCLA for a XVpostdoctoral fellowship. The competition was based, along with the usual CV and recommendation letters, on a project proposal relevant to this year's topic: the sacred. There were some sixty applicants working in the modern period since 1800; these new PhD's included (...) literary scholars, philosophers, historians, a few anthropologists, even a musicologist. I was taken aback to discover that not a single one ofthese projects made reference to the name or ideas of René Girard. When I remarked on this to the director ofthe program, a professor ofEnglish with a solid background in philosophy and literary theory, he offered the explanation that these ideas had had a vogue twenty years ago, but were no longer in fashion today. However exaggerated and shortsighted it may be, I take this judgment on the part ofan astute and reasonably unbiased observer as a call to action. Like it or not, the academic world, the university, is the center of American intellectual life. The ideas that motivate COV&R emerged from the university and, however powerful they may become and remain outside it, it is important for their survival that they retain their visibility within it. Thus it is important that we put aside any differences that may divide us in the pursuit ofthis goal that I know we all share. I will return to this point at the end of my talk. What is the origin of language? This question is not only one of formulating hypotheses about the origin, but ofdeciding what it is that we mean by the question itself. Recent advances in neuroscience, cognitive 2 Eric Gans science, speech physiology, paleontology, primatology, linguistics, and related fields make this question both easier and harder to answer than when I wrote The Origin ofLanguage over twenty years ago. I can say at the outset that nothing I have learned in the course of my research dissuades me as a humanist from venturing into an area in which the dominant voices are no longer those of linguists and prehistorians, but those of neuroscientists. As they have always done, scientific advances permit those concerned with the human, "anthropologists" in the broadest sense of the term, to redraw the boundaries of the domain within which anthropological reflection truly belongs. This position is not one widely held by the scientists themselves, who generally share an Enlightenment view for which all thinking not subject to scientific method, particularly that of religion, is a primitive survival condemned to, and deserving of, the fate of alchemy and Aristotelian cosmology. In this view, my—I think I can say, "our"—kind ofanthropology is not a respectable field of inquiry at all. The hypothetical attribution of an originary function to an event or scene considered memorable in itself is not-yet-understood as a necessary methodological tool in the human sciences. Yet a scientific method expanded to include events would not have to put religion within brackets as an expression of the irrational or explain it by an ad hoc theory of psychological expediency, but would begin to integrate within itself the understanding of the human that it has been the historical function of religion to provide. I do not think we need accept the Enlightenment vision ofhistory as the story ofthe continued advance ofscience into domains progressively vacated by unscientific thought. No doubt we no longer rely on religion to supply the basis for cosmology or for natural science in general. And as our knowledge ofthe brain continues to progress, it may no longer be necessary to rely on metaphysical philosophy in order to understand the processes of language and thought. But human culture is not centrally concerned with natural phenomena or even with logic or linguistic structure. It is concerned with the regulation ofhuman interaction, with ethics, and however much science can help provide ethical thought with options, it can never usurp its central cultural function. This last point is usually expressed by the old saw that you can't get to "ought" from "is." Science tells us how it is, not how... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Rawls's Originary Theory of JusticeEric Gans (bio)The fundamental thesis of generative anthropology is that the principal concern of human culture is and has been from the outset to defer the potential violence of mimetic desire. To this mode of thought, constructing a model of the good society in any but the general terms of "exchange" and "reciprocity" is unfaithful to the human community, whose operations have been (...) from the beginning beyond the grasp of any individual mind within the society, and in which since the rise of the market system we participate largely unmediated by ritual. Rather than providing a template for the "good society," originary thinking provides a touchstone for ethical progress: act so as to contribute to reciprocal exchange, negatively, by aiding those who need help to participate in the exchange system more fully, and positively, by creating new foci of desire that enrich the system of exchange, the circulation of desire and satisfaction. The result of these acts is to reduce or "defer" resentment, negatively, by removing grievances, and positively, by creating new opportunities for recycling resentment into productive activity.These precepts notwithstanding, the "moral model" of reciprocal exchange, as exemplified in the exchange of signs around the sacred center in the hypothetical originary event, provides the basis for a recurrent temptation to create utopias. The theoretical gesture of measuring a given social order against a moral ideal is an extension of the moral intuition we apply in judging all human actions; whatever our degree of resignation, we cannot help but resent any suggestion—even when it is "objectively" false—that we have been victims of a failure of reciprocity. Both the theory and the personal intuition are direct descendants of the originary exchange of representations, as are the moral "theories" that are explicitly grounded in the sacred. Abstract moral theorizing must ultimately appeal to either transcendence or intuition, and the appeal to the former differs only in its rhetoric from the appeal to the latter.Finally, these "timeless" reflections must be situated in history. Determining the proper relationship between universal morality and historically [End Page 149] particular ethics poses a particularly acute problem in the postmodern era. The question that has remained with us since the end of World War II is how to overcome the paralysis of Auschwitz—how to acknowledge the necessary deferral of reciprocity without condoning genocide. If we hold history's institutions to the touchstone of the moral model, they will always be found wanting, yet this historical experience tells us that if we do not so hold them, anything is possible. The fact that accusations of Nazism (or "fascism") continue to be made today—notably against Israel itself—is a sign that the moral dilemma has not yet been resolved. But unlike metaphysical thought, originary thinking takes the Holocaust as a sign not of the need to construct a social model that will resolve this dilemma, but of the inappropriateness of confronting it directly. Making the world a better place not only does not require but is in fact incompatible with a prior image of the world made good.The most serious attempt by mainstream Anglo-American social thought to grapple with this postmodern quandary is that of the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002), whose A Theory of Justice (1971) remains the era's most important work of moral philosophy. To sum up in my own terms Rawls's basic idea: if we imagine ourselves in an "original position" when society has not yet come into existence, so that our (future) place in it is hidden from us by a "veil of ignorance," then we will be able to agree on the criteria of a good society, since our uncertainty will convince us all equally of the necessity to protect ourselves from unfairness in the event we are assigned one of society's less desirable roles. We may then accept this imaginary agreement, unbiased by the participants' knowledge of their eventual social role, as universal humanity's most just arrangement. Rawls considers that under these conditions any inequality in the overall distribution of social goods can be justified only if it produces a margin of... (shrink)

René Girard’s anthropology goes beyond Durkheim and Freud in seeking knowledge in literary, mythical, and religious texts. Girard’s primary intuition is that human culture originated in response to the danger of violent mimetic crises among increasingly intelligent hominins, whose imitation of each other’s desires led to conflict. These crises were resolved by the mechanism of emissary murder: the proto-human community came to focus its aggression on a single scapegoat whose unanimous lynching, by “miraculously” bringing peace, led to its ritual repetition (...) in sacrifice. Because this theory fails to found the signs of human language and worship on the deferral of spontaneous action, Girard can only attribute the internal peace necessary to the human community to the exhaustion of violent aggression. Instead, generative anthropology proposes that, beginning from the premise that the need to control internecine violence was the source of the human, an appropriative gesture toward an object of common desire, deferred out of fear of violence, becomes understood as a sign of the object’s sacred/interdicted status, after which it can be peacefully divided among the group. Following this originary event, the sacred/signifying universe of language and religion gradually comes to include the totality of human activity. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 23, Issue 2, pp 236 - 255 In this article I compare some elements of Eric Gans’s thought with a few aspects of the philosophy of Hermann Cohen—first and foremost, Gans’s concept of the origin and Cohen’s concept of Ursprung—while revealing the deep affinity between these two lines of thinking.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From First Hesitation to Scenic ImaginationOriginary Thinking with Eric GansAndrew Bartlett (bio)Taken together, the publication of Eric Gans’s The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day (2008), the recent release of Adam Katz’s anthology The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry (2007),1 and the organization of three international gatherings devoted to generative anthropology2 suggest a recent infusion of vital energy into (...) the forward movement of generative anthropology. The goal of this review essay is to add a little to that infusion. The essay surveys the six major books of Eric Gans in which the originary hypothesis is defined, developed, tested, and taken onto various intellectual terrains. It has been composed with the readers of Contagion in mind. Insofar as it has a definable stance, that stance emphasises elements of generative anthropology that might encourage scholars and students familiar with the ideas of René Girard but more or less unfamiliar with the thinking of Eric Gans to begin studying Gans free of inhibitions about discontinuities between his way of thinking and that of Girard. This essay’s mode is one of affirmative exposition rather than critical suspicion. Its multiple suggestions are advanced in the conviction that neglecting one thinker for the sake of the other does an injustice to both. [End Page 89]IThe person ready to study the book where generative anthropology began—The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981)—should be set for an extraordinary experience. It stands as the most austere, abstract, and taxing of Gans’s books; but by virtue of those very qualities, the most rewarding and the best basis for understanding subsequent elaborations of the hypothesis. The Origin of Language may feel odd to readers who come to it working “backward” from later volumes or articles. In it, key terms in the later works, such as “resentment,” “mimetic,” “scenic,” even the adjective “originary,” do not figure prominently. In expositions where Gans explains the differences between René Girard’s institutional theory of representation (which proposes that language evolved somehow as a side effect of ritual) and Gans’s formal theory of representation, there is an odd thickness of cautious deference, a propriety verging on a reluctance to disagree. In Girard’s thought, the maximal form of human culture, the institution of ritual as it evolved from episodes of collective murder, is foundational; by contrast, in Gans, the minimal form of human culture, linguistic exchange as it has evolved in a dialectic of desire and representation, is foundational. Nor for Gans are the earliest “victims” of collective violence human ones; Gans’s hypothesis puts an object initially of appetite (most easily figured as food), transfigured by the sign into a desire-object, into the center of the scene of representation. The humans in generative anthropology are less murderous and more hungry than those in mimetic theory; the economic-consumerist element of human beings enjoys a privilege in Gans’s system that it does not have in the system of Girard, with its more orthodox otherworldliness.Generative anthropology is about human language. It takes linguistic exchange, the deferral of violence through representation, as the essence of the human. The title The Origin of Language reflects this. Gans’s hypothesis is that human language began with a communally mediated abortive gesture of appropriation toward a central object of appetite in a scenic event; that abortive gesture of appropriation is the gesture of originary thinking. Originary thinking now, even as I am doing it here, does what it did then at the beginning of human thought: it reflects on its own origin. The emission of the first human sign, that first abortive gesture of appropriation, is the object of the hypothesis. The mimetic paradox of rivalry and imitation familiar to students of Girard precedes the emission of the first ostensive gesture-sign, generating the double-bind circumstances that make possible its being chosen. For Gans, the collective violence familiar to students of Girard follows the emission of the first ostensive [End Page 90] sign; indeed, violence is intensified by the abortive gesture of appropriation—because what was an object merely of appetite before the... (shrink)

Here I consider the two most venerated arguments about the existence of God: the Ontological Argument and the Argument from Evil. The Ontological Argument purports to show that God’s nature guarantees that God exists. The Argument from Evil purports to show that God’s nature, combined with some plausible facts about the way the world is, guarantees (or is very compelling grounds for thinking) that God does not exist. Obviously, both arguments cannot be sound. But I argue here that they are (...) both unsound for the very same reason. (shrink)

There are many alleged problems with trusting another person’s moral testimony, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it fails to deliver moral understanding. Without moral understanding, one cannot do the right thing for the right reason, and so acting on trusted moral testimony lacks moral worth. This chapter, however, argues that moral advice differs from moral testimony, differs from it in a way that enables a defender of moral advice to parry this worry about moral worth. The basic (...) idea is that an advisor and an advisee can together constitute a joint agent, and that this joint agent’s action can indeed have moral worth. So while the advisee himself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone he lacks the right reason), and while the advisor herself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone she does not do the right thing), they together do the right for the right reason. (shrink)

This Element introduces the philosophical literature on models, with an emphasis on normative considerations relevant to models for decision-making. Chapter 1 gives an overview of core questions in the philosophy of modeling. Chapter 2 examines the concept of model adequacy for purpose, using three examples of models from the atmospheric sciences to describe how this sort of adequacy is determined in practice. Chapter 3 explores the significance of using models that are not adequate for purpose, including the purpose of informing (...) public decisions. Chapter 4 provides a basic framework for values in modelling, using a case study to highlight the ethical challenges in building models for decision making. It concludes by establishing the need for strategies to manage value judgments in modelling, including the potential for public participation in the process. (shrink)

We review and present a new meta‐analysis of research suggesting that ethicists in the United States appear to behave no morally better overall than do non‐ethicist professors. Measures include: returning library books, peer evaluation of overall moral behavior, voting participation, courteous and discourteous behavior at conferences, replying to student emails, paying conference registration fees and disciplinary society dues, staying in touch with one's mother, charitable giving, organ and blood donation, vegetarianism, and honesty in responding to survey questions. One multi‐measure study (...) found ethicists tending to embrace more stringent moral views, especially about meat eating and charitable donation. The same multi‐measure study found ethicists and other professors to show similarly small‐to‐medium correlations between their expressed normative attitudes and their self‐reported or directly measured behavior. (shrink)

This paper argues that under some conditions, when one person acts on the direction of another person, the two of them thereby act together, and that this explains why both the director and the directee can be responsible for what is done. In other words, a director and a directee can be a joint agent, one whose members are responsible for what they together do. This is most clearly so when the directive is a command. But it is also sometimes (...) so when the directive is a bit of advice. (shrink)

In 1970 a coalition of student activists opposing the Vietnam War circulated documents revealing the involvement of several prominent social scientists in U.S. counterinsurgency activities in Thailand--activities that could cause harm to the people who were the subject of the scholars' research. The disclosure of these materials, which detailed meetings with the Agency for International Development and the Defense Department, prompted two members of the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association to issue an unauthorized rebuke of the accused. Over (...) the next two years, the AAA agonized over the allegations and the appropriate response to them. Within an academic community already polarized by the war, political and professional acrimony reached unprecedented levels. Although the association ultimately passed a code of ethics, the key issues raised in the process were never fully resolved. Now back in print, Eric Wakin's Anthropology Goes to War is the first comprehensive study of what became known as the Thailand Controversy--and a timely reminder of a debate whose echoes may be heard in our own time. (shrink)

Semi-compatibilists intend to reconcile moral responsibility with causal determinism, even if determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise. For them, moral responsibility does not require free will, which is not a necessary condition for moral responsibility. They agree with the view that causal determinism is incompatible with free will. Free will is incompatible with determinism as well as moral responsibility. Both compatibilists and semi-compatibilists argue for the compatibility between determinism and moral responsibility. However, the latter fails to prove sufficiently (...) the reason why determinism is compatible with moral responsibility. (shrink)

Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle school physics text or a description of charitable organizations). Participants then expressed their attitudes toward charitable giving and were either asked how (...) much they would hypothetically donate if given $10 (Experiment 1) or told they had a 10% chance of winning $10 and given the opportunity to donate from their potential winnings (Experiments 2–4). Across the four experiments, participants in all of the narrative conditions and in some of the argument conditions tended to express more positive attitudes toward charitable giving and donated about $1 more on average than did participants in the control conditions. These effects appear to have been mediated by the “narrative transportation” scale, which suggests that appeals to donate can be effective if they engage participants’ emotions, imagery, and interest. (shrink)

Although a large number of literatures have explored the relationship between electronic communication during nonwork time and individual perception and behavior under the Western culture background, we still have some limitations on this topic under the cultural background of collectivism, dedication and “Guanxi” in China. Different from Western organizations, Chinese employees tend to put work first and are more inclusive of handling work tasks during nonwork time. This type of communication during nonwork time can significantly affect employees’ cognition, emotion and (...) behavior. From the perspective of Job Demands-Resources theory, this study constructs a double-edged model between electronic communication during nonwork time and employee withdrawal behavior. Sample data were collected from 516 employees with clear working time boundaries in China. The results indicate that electronic communication during nonwork time has a U-shaped effect on employee withdrawal behavior and an inverted U-shaped effect on employee’s cognition, namely job engagement. Job engagement plays a mediating role between them. Moreover, regulatory emotional self-efficacy has a moderating effect on the relationship between electronic communication during nonwork time and job engagement. These findings not only provide theoretical and practical implications for managers and employees on how to reduce withdrawal behaviors, but also advance our understanding of electronic communication during nonwork time in Chinese cultural context. (shrink)

" Ce général expérimenté nous parle avec une grande sagesse des qualités humaines et de la conscience nécessaires pour combattre l'ennemi et diriger les hommes. Ses pages m'ont surpris par leur limpidité et leur profondeur. Nous sommes bien loin de l'armée archaïque que j'ai connue dans ma jeunesse ", père Guy Gilbert. Ce livre s'adresse au jeune étudiant qui réfléchit à devenir officier. Aucun ouvrage, récent en tout cas, n 'avait encore pris ces jeunes et leurs parents pour cible, afin (...) de tenter de leur parler, avec des mots du début du 21e siècle, de la guerre et du terrorisme, mais aussi de morale et d'amitié, de courage et de volonté. Et d 'amour et de vertus, et de principes. Et de discipline et de sacrifice et de générosité, qu'il a en quantité à condition qu'on lui explique comment il va en faire le meilleur usage. Ses propos intéresseront aussi tous ceux qui, même en dehors des corps armés, s 'interrogent sur l'énigme de l'homme face à la violence. (shrink)

Justice, Sustainability, and Security not only enhances our knowledge of these issues, but it teases out our moral dimensions and offer prescriptions for how governments and global actors might craft their policies to better consider their effects on the global human condition.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky expressed a strange and surprising sentiment through one of the characters of The Brothers Karamazov. A dying young man named Markel declares: Every one of us has sinned against all men, and I more than others." He later says: "...every one of us is answerable for everyone else and for everything." Markel's absurd claims have engendered many reflections on the nature of suffering and what it means to be responsible for someone else's suffering. The world has no shortage (...) of pain and evil; what exactly is the relationship between suffering and responsibility? Markel's declarations press forward a question that drives this essay collection: how responsible should we consider ourselves for the suffering of the world? This volume is a collection of essays that struggle in various ways to understand and respond to several philosophical, theological and practical problems. In each case the authors grapple with issues surrounding suffering, immorality, evil, exploitation and oppression. The contributors share a clear concern for the ways that philosophers and theologians should respond to the problems of suffering and evil. They also share a conviction that these remain intense and central problems for philosophy and theology. Evil is an obstacle for belief, for morality, for hospitality, and for hope. This book struggles to address the particular and strong sense of responsibility that falls on Christians when it comes to understanding and, more importantly, responding to the problems of suffering and evil in the world. (shrink)

This is a book about Kant's views on causality as understood in their proper historical context. Specifically, Eric Watkins argues that a grasp of Leibnizian and anti-Leibnizian thought in eighteenth-century Germany helps one to see how the critical Kant argued for causal principles that have both metaphysical and epistemological elements. On this reading Kant's model of causality does not consist of events, but rather of substances endowed with causal powers that are exercised according to their natures and circumstances. This (...) innovative conception of Kant's view of causality casts a light on Kant's philosophical beliefs in general, such as his account of temporality, his explanation of the reconciliation of freedom and determinism, and his response to the skeptical arguments of Hume. (shrink)

On the concept of self; study based on Vedic literature.

This article provides a critical overview of competing theories of conceptual structure (definitional structure, probabilistic structure, theory structure), including the view that concepts have no structure (atomism). We argue that the explanatory demands that these different theories answer to are best accommodated by an organization in which concepts are taken to have atomic cores that are linked to differing types of conceptual structure.

I argue that the last reflections of merleau-ponty published in his working notes ``the visible and the invisible'' is a programme for an embodied phenomenology. the aim of this programme is the overcoming of metaphysics, epitomized in subject-object dualism. the dissociated look of metaphysics results in a conceptualization of the world. philosophers must return from this flight from their bodies to the flesh of their existential situation to recover the ``things themselves''.