There was a famous discussion between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos which revealed the lostness and emptiness of this remarkable representative of established academic philosophy to everyone who had eyes. Cassirer had been a pupil of Hermann Cohen, the founder of the neo-Kantian school. Cohen had elaborated a system of philosophy whose center was ethics. Cassirer had transformed Cohen's system into a new system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disappeared. It had been silently dropped: he had not (...) faced the problem. Heidegger had faced the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible, and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.... Only a great thinker could help us in our plight. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger. The only question of importance, of course, is the question whether Heidegger's teaching is true or not. But the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence—of who is competent to judge. StraussHeidegger conceals nothing. He does not lie. He says what he really thinks.JanicaudIt is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him. LevinasOnly once or twice in my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching have I ever spoken about what really matters to me.HeideggerFor a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I ever believe what I say, and if indeed I do happen to tell the truth I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find. MachiavelliThe `doctrine' of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying, to which man is exposed so that he might expend himself for it. HeideggerBut for those on the outside everything is in parables; so that they may see but not perceive, and hearing, they may hear but not understand; lest they should turn, and their sins be forgiven them. Mark 4:12“Now do you recognize that I am a philosopher?”... “I would have, had you remained silent.”BoethiusThe same goes for Heidegger: It is necessary to know how to listen to the silences of philosophers. These are always eloquent.Althusser. (shrink)

Gender dysphoria (GD) is marked by an incongruence between a person’s biological sex at birth, and their felt gender (or gender identity). There is continuing debate regarding the benefits and drawbacks of physiological treatment of GD in children, a pathway, beginning with endocrine treatment to suppress puberty. Currently, the main alternative to physiological treatment consists of the so-called “wait-and-see” approach, which often includes counseling or other psychotherapeutic treatment. In this paper, we argue in favor of a “third pathway” for the (...) diagnosis and treatment of GD in youths. To make our case, we draw on a recent development in bioethics: the phenomenological approach. Scholars such as Slatman and Svenaeus have argued that the extent to which the body can (or should be) manipulated or reconstructed through medical intervention is not only determined by consideration of ethical frameworks and social and legal norms. Rather, we must also take account of patients’ personal experience of their body, the personal and social values associated with it, and their understanding of its situation in their life: their narrative identities. We apply this phenomenological approach to medicine and nursing to the diagnosis and treatment of GD in youth. In particular, we discuss Zahavi and Martiny’s conception of the phenomenological interview, in order to show that narrative techniques can assist in the process of gender identification and in the treatment of youth presenting with GD. We focus on two case studies that highlight the relevance of a narrative-based interview in relations between patients, HCPs, and family, to expose the influence of social ideologies on how young people presenting with GD experience their bodies and gender. (shrink)

1. I have fond memories of the Linguistic Society of America meeting in New Orleans just after Christmas in 1988, the last time I was able to see all my humanist friends from graduate school who were attending the concurrent meeting of the MLA. Shortly after that, the LSA decided to forego the company of humanists and assemble by itself during the first week of January. It's hard to fault the decision. Over and above the obvious practical advantages, like not (...) having to wait in line for forty-five minutes outside popular restaurants, the groups had been growing apart intellectually for some time. Few linguists bothered to cross town for MLA sessions on topics like onomastics, English usage, and the history of lexicography. Nor for that matter were those sessions drawing many MLA attendees, either. Literary people didn't seem to be much interested in language study anymore; what filled their ballrooms now were the sessions on deconstruction and other poststructuralist enthusiasms. It was like going back for your annual drink with your high-school sweetheart and finding that you had less and less to talk about. They didn't know what subjacency was and we didn't know what alterity was, and neither seemed to care. If you were of a mind to look for milestones, you could take that as the time when linguistic semantics definitively cut itself loose from its philological roots. Like a lot of semanticists, I had mixed feelings about the break. It's undeniable that linguistic semantics couldn't have come of age as an autonomous empirical discipline if it hadn't.. (shrink)

As Donnellan (1966) and many others have pointed out, a sentence like (1) has two readings: 1. The person who's parked in front of the restaurant is in a hurry. On the attributive reading, the description the person who's parked in front of the restaurant is interpreted as a quantifier: it says that the unique person who's parked in front of the restaurant is in a hurry, with no implication that the speaker has a particular person in mind — maybe (...) she simply inferred his haste from his choice of a parking spot. On the referential reading, the description picks out a particular person — say Jones, who's waiting for his car at the valet parking station with visible impatience. The question is, is (1) semantically ambiguous? Not if you accept the Russellian view, which holds that the description in (1) is always interpreted as a quantifier, with the referential interpretation arising via a conversational implicature that arises from the hearer's assumption that the speaker is trying to say something relevant and has a particular person in mind. In that case the utterance doesn't literally say anything about Jones, though the speaker may succeed in identifying him by uttering it. (shrink)

In this carefully researched, thought-provoking book, Geoffrey Hughes examines the trajectory of political correctness and its impact on public life.

The renowned occult scholar Arthur Edward Waite left no stone unturned when preparing this meticulously researched volume on the life and works of the French mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. Drawing on contemporary biographies, correspondences, and all the source materials that were available to him at the time, he put together a biography and summary of Saint-MartinÍs work that is still unsurpassed to this day. This edition is presented with modernised typography and a new and expanded index.

Subtle-body practices are found particularly in Indian, Indo-Tibetan and East Asian societies, but have become increasingly familiar in Western societies, especially through the various healing and yogic techniques and exercises associated with them. This book explores subtle-body practices from a variety of perspectives, and includes both studies of these practices in Asian and Western contexts. The book discusses how subtle-body practices assume a quasi-material level of human existence that is intermediate between conventional concepts of body and mind. Often, this level (...) is conceived of in terms of an invisible structure of channels, associated with the human body, through which flows of quasi-material substance take place. Contributors look at how subtle-body concepts form the basic explanatory structure for a wide range of practices. These include forms of healing, modes of exercise and martial arts as well as religious practices aimed at the refinement and transformation of the human mindbody complex. By highlighting how subtle-body practices of many kinds have been introduced into Western societies in recent years, the book explores the possibilities for new models of understanding which these concepts open up. It is a useful contribution to studies on Asian Religion and Philosophy. (shrink)

In this book an international and multidisciplinary team addresses significant ethical questions about the rights to access, manage and interpret the material remains of the past.

Should society care about Christian morality? Are Christians out of touch with complex moral decision-making? Christian Morality: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Thinking about Contemporary Moral Issues provides readers with a framework for identifying and applying Christian moral principles to divisive issues. First, readers learn of the theological and philosophical foundations of Christian ethics. Two additional chapters explain how personal and social factors influence our capacity to think critically and Christianly about morality. Second, readers will learn about forming Christian moral judgments (...) by seeing how different thinkers address six contemporary moral issues: abortion, same-sex relationships, equal treatment of men and women in the workplace, sex education, and racial bias in incarceration polices. (shrink)

Humanity between gods and beasts? -- Error -- Ancient understandings reassessed and the consequences for ontologies -- Language and audiences -- Philosophical implications.

Moral philosophers have mostly condemned the condonation of a bad act as being close to complicity in wrongdoing or, at best, as indicative of a lax moral conscience. I argue, in contrast, that condoning a wrongful act is sometimes not only permissible but positively virtuous. After considering the nature of condonation, I describe a range of circumstances in which it may be an appropriate response to wrongdoing, expressing such virtues as compassion and mercifulness, tolerance of human frailty, a love of (...) amity, and a proper respectfulness for others’ autonomy as moral agents. (shrink)

The multifaceted work of the late Susan Leigh Star is explored through a selection of her writings and essays by friends and colleagues. Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions about the marginalizing as well as the liberating powers of science and technology. In the landmark work Sorting Things Out, Star and Geoffrey Bowker revealed (...) the social and ethical histories that are deeply embedded in classification systems. Star's most celebrated concept was the notion of boundary objects: representational forms—things or theories—that can be shared between different communities, with each holding its own understanding of the representation. Unfortunately, Leigh was unable to complete a work on the poetics of infrastructure that further developed the full range of her work. This volume collects articles by Star that set out some of her thinking on boundary objects, marginality, and infrastructure, together with essays by friends and colleagues from a range of disciplines—from philosophy of science to organization science—that testify to the wide-ranging influence of Star's work. Contributors Ellen Balka, Eevi E. Beck, Dick Boland, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Janet Ceja Alcalá, Adele E. Clarke, Les Gasser, James R. Griesemer, Gail Hornstein, John Leslie King, Cheris Kramarae, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Karen Ruhleder, Kjeld Schmidt, Brian Cantwell Smith, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm L. Strauss, Jane Summerton, Stefan Timmermans, Helen Verran, Nina Wakeford, Jutta Weber. (shrink)

This comprehensive handbook presents the major philosophical perspectives on the nature, prospects, problems and social context of age and aging in an era of dramatically increasing life-expectancy. Drawing on the latest research in gerontology, medicine and the social sciences, its twenty-seven chapters examine our intuitions and common sense beliefs about the meaning of aging and explore topics such as the existential experience of old age, aging in different philosophical and religious traditions, the place of the elderly in contemporary society and (...) the moral rights and responsibilities of the old. This book provides innovative and leading-edge research that will help to determine the parameters of the philosophy of aging for years to come. Key Features - Structured in four parts addressing the meaning, experience, ethics and future of aging - Comprehensive ethical coverage including of the retirement age, health-care for the elderly and the transhumanist life-extending project - Focused treatment of the dementia 'epidemic' and the philosophy of the mind and self The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging is an essential resource for scholars, researchers and advanced students in the philosophy of the self, moral and political philosophy, bioethics, phenomenology, narrative studies and philosophy of economics. It is also an ideal volume for researchers, advanced students and professionals in gerontology, health care, psychology, sociology and population studies.. (shrink)

In the last century, philosophers turned their attention to language. One place they have looked for clues about its nature is Plato’s Cratylus, which considers whether names are naturally or conventionally correct. The dialogue is a source of annoyance to many commentators because it does not take a clear position on the central question. At times, it argues that language is conventional, and, at other times, defends the view that language is natural. This lack of commitment has led to a (...) longstanding dispute over the outcome of the dialogue. I argue that the Cratylus provides no clear resolution to this problem because it presupposes certain unexamined metaphysical commitments about the nature of reality, which are in need of thorough investigation. (shrink)

The desire for esteem, and the associated desire for good reputation, serve an important role in ordinary social life in disciplining interactions and supporting the operation of social norms. The fact that many Internet relations are conducted under separate dedicated e-identities may encourage the view that Internet relations are not susceptible to these esteem-related incentives. We argue that this view is mistaken. Certainly, pseudonyms allow individuals to moderate the effects of disesteem-either by changing the pseudonym to avoid the negative reputation, (...) or by partitioning various audiences according to different audience values. However, there is every reason to believe that a good e-reputation is an object of desire for real agents. Further, although integrating one’s reputation under a single identity has some esteem-enhancing features, those features are not necessarily decisive. We explore in the paper what some of the countervailing considerations might be, by appeal to various analogies with the Internet case. (shrink)

The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expression that some teenagers use as an intensifier when they’re emphasizing (...) that social identity. That is, racists don’t use slurs because they’re derogatory; slurs are derogatory because they’re the words that racists use. To use a slur is to exploit the Maxim of Manner (or Levinson’s M-Principle) to signal one’s affiliation with a group that has a disparaging attitude towards the slur’s referent. This account is sufficient to explain all the familiar properties of slurs, such as their speaker orientation and “nondetachability,” with no need of additional linguistic mechanisms. It also explains some features of slurs that are rarely if ever explored; for example the variation in tone and strength among the different slurs for a particular group, the existence of words we count as slurs, such as 'redskin', which almost all of their users consider to be respectful, and the curious absence in Standard English of any commonly used slurs—by which I mean words used to express a negative attitude toward an entire group—for Muslims and women. (shrink)

1. Rabbi simhah Zissel Ziv and the Talmud Torah -- 2. Virtue and the path of happiness -- 3. Simhah Zissel among the philosophers -- 4. The great effort of musar -- 5. Learning to love.

This collection brings together leading anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers to discuss the sciences and mathematics used in various Eastern, Western, and Indigenous societies, both ancient and contemporary. The authors analyze prevailing assumptions about these societies and propose more faithful, sensitive analyses of their ontological views about reality--a step toward mutual understanding and translatability across cultures and research fields. Science in the Forest, Science in the Past is a pioneering interdisciplinary exploration that will challenge the way readers interested in (...) sciences, mathematics, humanities, social research, computer sciences, and education think about deeply held notions of what constitutes reality, how it is apprehended, and how to investigate it. (shrink)

This book looks at the work and influence of Leo Strauss in a variety of ways that will be of interest to readers of political philosophy. It will be of particular interest to Catholics and scholars of other religious traditions. Strauss had a great deal of interaction with his contemporary Catholic scholars, and many of his students or their students teach or have taught at Catholic colleges and universities in America. Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers brings together work by (...) scholars from two continents, some of whom knew Strauss, one of whom was his student at the University of Chicago. The first section of essays considers Catholic responses to Strauss’s project of recovering Classical natural right as against modern individual rights. Some of the authors suggest that his approach can be a fruitful corrective to an uncritical reception of modern ideas. Nevertheless, most point out that the Catholic cannot accept all of Strauss’s project. The second section deals with areas of overlap between Strauss and Catholics. Some of the chapters explore encounters with his contemporary scholars while others turn to more current concerns. The final section approaches the theological-political question itself, a question central to both Strauss’s work and that of the Catholic intellectual tradition. This section of the book considers the relationship of Strauss’s work to Christianity and Christian commitments at a broader level. Because Christianity does not have an explicit political doctrine, Christians have found themselves as rulers, subjects, and citizens in a variety of political regimes. Leo Strauss’s return to Platonic political philosophy can provide a useful lens through which his Catholic readers can assess what it means for there to be a best regime. (shrink)

The metaphor of 'dialogue' has been put to different descriptive and evaluative uses by constitutional and political theorists studying interactions between institutions concerning rights. It has also featured prominently in the opinions of courts and the rhetoric and deliberations of legislators. This volume brings together many of the world's leading constitutional and political theorists to debate the nature and merits of constitutional dialogues between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches. Constitutional Dialogue explores dialogue's democratic significance, examines its relevance to the (...) functioning and design of constitutional institutions, and explores constitutional dialogues from an international and transnational perspective. (shrink)

The paper mobilizes Adam Smith’s treatment of the division of labour in relation to the production, consumption and exchange of knowledge. One aspect of this mobilization deals with the epistemic demands that exchange makes on its participants. The other deals with increasing returns in the provision of knowledge itself, treating knowledge creation as just another example of specialization and exchange. These two aspects come together in relation to the epistemic demands associated with assessing knowledge quality. These demands differ according to (...) whether the knowledge is embodied in products or whether the knowledge is an object for its own sake. It is argued that disciplines play a critical role as institutions for meeting the epistemic demands that the division of labour creates in the ‘knowledge’ case. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

From Geoffrey A. Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, which has sold more than 1 million copies, The Infinite Staircase is a bold new book that combines science and philosophy to answer two fundamental questions for humanity: the metaphysical "where do I fit in the grand scheme of things?" and the ethical "how should I behave?".

Words like you, here, and tomorrow are different from other expressions in two ways. First, and by definition, they have different kinds of meanings, which are context-dependent in ways that the meanings of names and descriptions are not. Second, their meanings play a different kind of role in the interpretations of the utterances that contain them. For example, the meaning of you can be paraphrased by a description like "the addressee of the utterance." But an utterance of (1) doesn't say (...) the same thing as an utterance of (2). (shrink)

In a Special Issue of Discourse Studies titled ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’, contributing authors criticize Heritage’s research on participants’ orientations to, and management of, the distribution of knowledge in conversation. These authors claim that the analytic framework Heritage developed for analyzing epistemic phenomena privileges the analysts’ over the participants’ point of view, and rejects standard methods of conversation analysis ; that and are adopted in developing and defending the use of abstract analytic schemata that offer little purchase on either the (...) specific actions speakers accomplish or the understanding others display of them; and that, by virtue of these deficiencies, claims about the systematic relevance of epistemic phenomena for talk-in-interaction breach long-standing norms regarding the relationship between data analysis and generalizing claims. Using a collection of excerpts bearing on the import of epistemics for action formation and action sequencing, I demonstrate that these claims are patently false and suggest that they reflect the authors’ effort to recast CA as a kind of fundamentalist enterprise. I then consider excerpts from a second collection to illustrate how the form of social organization described by Heritage can be used to explicate other phenomena that depend on systematic alterations to its basic features. In conclusion, I suggest that CA’s success in enhancing our grasp of the organization of talk-in-interaction derives from its unique commitment to both generalization and context specificity, collections and single cases, findings plus a continual openness to the ‘something more’ that each particular case can provide. (shrink)

Expands the horizons of Jewish virtue ethics, demonstrating how central virtue has been to the history of Jewish ethics.

This book presents an extended argument for the thesis that people of the present day are not debarred in principle from passing moral judgement on people who lived in former days, notwithstanding the inevitable differences in social and cultural circumstances that separate us. Some philosophers argue that because we can see things only from our own peculiar historical situation, we lack a sufficiently objective vantage point from which to appraise past people and their acts. If they are correct, then the (...) judgements passed by twenty-first-century people must inevitably be biased and irrelevant, grounded on moral standards that would have seemed alien in that 'foreign country' of the past. This book challenges this relativistic position, contending that it seriously underestimates our ability to engage imaginatively with people who, however much their lifestyles may have differed from our own, were our fellow human beings, endowed with the same basic instincts, aversions, desires and aspirations. Taking a stand on a naturalistic theory of human beings, coupled with a Kantian conception of the equal worth of all human members of the Kingdom of Ends, Scarre argues that historical moral judgements can be sensitive to circumstances, fitting and fair, and untainted by anachronism. The discussion ends by examining the implications of this position for the practice of historians and for the ethics of memory and commemoration. (shrink)

I assess a number of connected ideas about temporal experience that are introspectively plausible, but which I believe can be argued to be incorrect. These include the idea that temporal experiences are extended experiential processes, that they have an internal structure that in some way mirrors the structure of the apparent events they present, and the idea that time in experience is in some way represented by time itself. I explain how these ideas can be developed into more sharply defined (...) views, and then argue that these views are inconsistent with certain empirical facts about how time is represented in the brain. These facts instead support a kind of atomic view, on which temporal experiences are temporally unstructured atoms. (shrink)

This book takes the thinking of Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit and J. G. A. Pocock on republican liberty and explores the way in which this idea of liberty can be used to illuminate educational practice. It argues that republican liberty is distinct from both positive and negative liberty, and its emphasis on liberty as non-dependency gives the concept of liberty a particularly critical role in contemporary society. Each chapter formulates and expounds the idea that an empire of liberty requires the (...) existence of what are termed 'liberty-bearing agents', and shows how education - with a particular emphasis on knowledge - is needed to foster the human powers which allow people to become liberty-bearing. It is also emphasised, however, that republican liberty is non-perfectionist and non-eudaimonic: the core values enshrined in an empire of liberty centre on non-dependency rather than the promulgation of a certain way of life. Drawing on prominent seventeenth century contract theorists, the link between liberty and authority is explained, suggesting that appropriate authoritative structures need to underpin the provision of education, and especially schooling, if educational practice devoted to the pursuit of liberty is to flourish. Liberty and Education will be of value to both educational theorists unfamiliar with republican theory, as well as republican theorists interested in how their theory might play out in education. It will also be of interest to researchers and students from the fields of politics and the philosophy of education. (shrink)

Neuroscientists have long sought to study the dynamic activity of the human brain—what's happening in the brain, that is, while people are thinking, feeling, and acting. Ideally, an inside look at brain function would simultaneously and continuously measure the biochemical state of every cell in the central nervous system. While such a miraculous method is science fiction, a century of progress in neuroimaging technologies has made such simultaneous and continuous measurement a plausible fiction. Despite this progress, practitioners of modern neuroimaging (...) struggle with two kinds of limitations: those that attend the particular neuroimaging methods we have today and those that would limit any method of imaging neural activity, no matter how powerful.In this essay, I consider the liabilities and potential of techniques that measure human brain activity. I am concerned here only with methods that measure relevant physiologic states of the central nervous system and relate those measures to particular mental states. I will consider in particular the preeminent method of functional neuroimaging: BOLD fMRI. While there are several practical limits on the biological information that current technologies can measure, these limits—as important as they are—are minor in comparison to the fundamental logical restraints on the conclusions that can be drawn from brain imaging studies. (shrink)

This chapter identifies three main sources of the Stoic elements in Hobbes's philosophy: the early Christian‐Stoic Tertullian, the modern “Neo‐Stoic” school of Justus Lipsius, and the natural philosophers of the Cavendish Circle he frequented. Perhaps the most direct Stoical impact on Hobbes was the second/third century Church Father Tertullian. Hobbes and Cavendish are at bottom kindred Stoic spirits, though their systems diverge on the precise nature of material activity. The chapter explores the Stoic character of Hobbesian space, time, causality, and (...) God, especially as these notions are employed in his natural philosophy. Hobbes's quasi‐realism about imaginary space is highly reminiscent of the Stoics' conception of pure space as one of the problematic “incorporeals.” The chapter shows that Hobbes's metaphysical views, though quite unorthodox in his day, served to buttress his overall materialist, empiricist, and mechanist program in natural philosophy. (shrink)