Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Michael Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal. “Penetrating and sprightly...Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism in the modern history of human dignity. His command of the history is impressive...Rosen is a wonderful guide to the recent German constitutional thinking about human dignity...[ (...) class='Hi'>Rosen] is in general an urbane and witty companion, achieving his aim of accessibly written philosophy.” —Samuel Moyn, The Nation “[An] elegant, interesting and lucid exploration of the concept of dignity...Drawing on classical, liberal and Catholic traditions, Rosen hopes to rehabilitate dignity to its rightful place near the centre of moral thought...Rosen's admirable book deserves wide attention from political theorists, jurisprudes and political philosophers.” —Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education “Dignity deserves to be widely read, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also as a corrective to the habit of discussing such topics in abstraction from their social context. Whether or not one agrees with Rosen's arguments, there can be no doubt he has widened our horizons.” —Rae Langton, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that every entity falls into one of twocategories: Some are concrete; the rest abstract. The distinction issupposed to be of fundamental significance for metaphysics andepistemology. This article surveys a number of recent attempts to sayhow it should be drawn.

This chapter contains sections titled: Kantian Contractualism Exegesis A Counterexample, and a Response Another Counterexample The Refutation of Rule‐Consequentialism Kantian Contractualism Revised (KCR) Discharging the Metaphor Might KCPR Be the Supreme Principle of Morality?

It is incorrect to construe Hume as a Pyrrhonian sceptic. Or so I have argued elsewhere. To the contrary, Hume in fact offers a detailed defence of the thesis that the norms of scientific inference, that is, the “rules by which to judge of causes and effects”, arereasonablerules to follow in forming our beliefs. Conforming to these rules in its formation of causal beliefs is astrategythe understanding employs in order to satisfy the end of curiosity (T271). Science is reasonable because, (...) so far as we can, within our fallible limits, discover, it is the strategy of belief formation that is the best means of achieving our end of truth, insofar as the latter is, within our fallible limits, attainable. (shrink)

Adorno and Horkheimer critically develop the concept of the “culture industry” in the third chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. The treatment there has some right to be considered one of the core texts in Critical Theory's philosophy of art. This essay discusses the main claims and arguments of that work, as well as earlier essays in Adorno's music theory and later essays that turn to film aesthetics. Attention focuses on illuminating the basis for Adorno and Horkheimer's views on the culture (...) industry in light of their social ontology and epistemology, their account of aesthetic form, and their conception of commodity as style. (shrink)

The Dreaming Mind provides an insightful, interdisciplinary approach to the study of dreaming, exploring its nature and examining some of the implications of dream states for theories of consciousness, cognition and the self. Offering an integrative approach into our understanding of dreams and the mind, it is essential reading for students and researchers of consciousness, dreams, philosophy and cognitive sciences, as well as anyone who is curious about dreaming.

Region R Question: How many objects — entities, things — are contained in R? Ignore the empty space. Our question might better be put, 'How many material objects does R contain?' Let's stipulate that A, B and C are metaphysical atoms: absolutely simple entities with no parts whatsoever besides themselves. So you don't have to worry about counting a particle's top half and bottom half as different objects. Perhaps they are 'point-particles', with no length, width or breadth. Perhaps they are (...) extended in space without possessing spatial parts (if that is possible). Never mind. We stipulate that A, B and C are perfectly simple. We also stipulate that they are connected as follows. A and B are stuck together in such a way that when a force is applied to one of them, they move together 'as a unit'. Moreover, the two of them together exhibit behavior that neither would exhibit on its own — Perhaps they emit a certain sound, or glow in the dark — whereas C is.. (shrink)

Based on Medicine as a human experience / David E. Reiser, David H. Rosen. c1984.

Alan Weir: Quine's Naturalism: Starting with the distinction between epistemological and ontological naturalism, this chapter focuses most on Quine's epistemological naturalism, not the ontological anti‐naturalism he thought it leads to. It is argued that naturalized epistemology is not central to Quine's epistemology. Quine's key epistemological principle is: follow the methods of science, and only those. Can Quine demarcate scientific methods from non‐scientific ones? The problems which have been raised here, for example in the case of mathematics, are considered. A main (...) theme is the relationship between Quine's naturalism and reductionist forms of “scientistic” naturalism. Quine is generally taken to be an anti‐reductionist, unsurprisingly given his explicit anti‐reductionist pronouncements from “Two Dogmas” onward. It is argued that the situation is more complex than this and that key Quinean arguments are driven by a positivistic reductionism he never entirely broke free from. (shrink)

This book focuses on one of the greatest saint/avatāras of all time: Śrī Chaitanya Mahāprabhu. This charismatic religious leader popularized song and dance as a yogic science and conveyed teachings as relevant today as they were in his native Bengal some five hundred years ago. This is the story of how his message spread throughout the world.

The non-lover -- The concealed lover -- The lover -- The language of love.

From the time of Reid through Coleridge to T. H. Green, Hume was interpreted as a sceptic and as a wholly negative philosopher. And from their perspective such an interpretation no doubt makes some sense, given the vested interest in religion and the absolute of the idealists: from that perspective it is an essential part of a positive position that it take one beyond the realm of ordinary objects known by sense experience to a realm of entities that transcend that (...) world of everyday life. That interpretation lingers on, like bad jokes, to retail in Philosophy 100 classes. On the other hand, in an age where the demand that one have access to a transcendent entity is less insistent, it has become possible to challenge the orthodox reading of Hume. The first to do this was Norman Kemp Smith, who argued that, while Hume was a sceptic, he in fact also had a positive view, not to be sure that of Reid & Co., but that of anaturalist, that is, one who holds that our beliefs, and our moral commitments, are none of them rational, none of them products of reason, but rather are products of our instinctive and passionate natures. This interpretation continues to have important defenders such as Popkin and Stroud. More recently, however, some scholars have gone further and argued that there are good senses in which Hume is not a sceptic, and that he constructs a case that our instinctual beliefs are not only natural but also rational. Major works defending this reading of Hume as a naturalized epistemologist are those of Livingston and Jones. The Kemp Smith interpretation has, however, found a major new defender in John Wright'sThe Sceptical Realism of David Hume. (shrink)

These essays bring together forty years of work in ontology. Intentionality, negation, universals, bare particulars, tropes, general facts, relations, the myth of the 'myth of the given', are among the topics covered. Bergmann, Quine, Sellars, Russell, Wittgenstein, Hume, Bradley, Hochberg, Dummett, Frege, Plato, are among the philosophers discussed. The essays criticize non-Humean notions of cause; they criticize the notion that besides simple atomic facts there are also negative facts and general facts. They defend a realism of properties as universals, against (...) nominalism; bare particulars; a (qualified) realism with regard to logical form; a Russellian account of relations; and an account of minds and intentionality, which is opposed to materialism, but is also a form of (methodological) behaviourism. In general, the ontology is one of logical atomism and empiricist throughout, rooted in a Principle of Acquaintance. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning of time from three points of view: (1) David Bohm's concepts of "vertical implicate order" and "holomovement"; (2) Alfred North Whitehead's idea of the "actual occasion"; and (3) the author's notion of "nondual duality." The author argues that Bohm and Whitehead alike implicitly divide time into dual and nondual aspects and that, in failing to adequately reconcile these, time, in effect, is denied. The alternative offered seeks to thoroughly integrate dual and nondual (holistic) modalities in (...) the understanding that time as becoming entails a dynamic interpenetration of its opposing aspects. Visual geometry and topology are employed to flesh out the "nondual duality" of temporal structure. (shrink)

This essay proposes that Hume's non-substantialist bundle account of minds is basically correct. The concept of a person is not a metaphysical notion but a forensic one, that of a being who enters into the moral and normative relations of civil society. A person is a bundle but it is also a structured bundle. Hume's metaphysics of relations is argued must be replaced by a more adequate one such as that of Russell, but beyond that Hume's account is essentially correct. (...) In particular it is argued that it is one's character that constitutes one's identity; and that sympathy and the passions of pride and humility are central in forming and maintaining one's character and one's identity as a person. But also central is one's body: a person is an embodied consciousness: the notion that one's body is essential to one's identity is defended at length. Various concepts of mind and consciousness are examined - for example, neutral monism and intentionality - and also the concept of privacy and our inferences to other minds. (shrink)

Ayn Rand's political theory is based on the normative principles that man's life is the standard of value and that concern with his own life is man's primary moral purpose, and the metaphysical facts that reason is his basic tool of survival and that its exercise is volitional and requires the absence of coercion. This chapter first presents Rand's analysis of the nature of government. It then discusses why Rand holds that the proper purpose of government is the securing of (...) individual rights, and why it follows from that that capitalism is the only moral social system. In detailing Rand's defense of capitalism, the chapter also examines why she is an ardent proponent of property rights, and thus why property rights take a central place in her writings on politics. Finally, the chapter describes Rand's defense of intellectual property rights, which she views as core property rights. (shrink)