D'Arcy May, in his review, contends Magliola argues that the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and rebirth are contradictory, whereas Magliola in fact argues just the opposite--that these two Buddhist doctrines are not contradictory (and he explains why). What Magliola does contend is that Buddhist no-self and rebirth contradict the Catholic teachings of individual identity and "one life-span only." D'Arcy May's review contends that Magliola admits "authoritative statements" are "hard to come by" in Buddhism, whereas Magliola (...) in his book contends that "authoritative statements" play a very important role in Buddhism: his book explains how "authority" functions in Buddhism, and he directs readers to the careful "vetting" of his book--including his discussions of "authority in Buddhism"-- by Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi (for Theravada) and Ven. Dr. Dhammadipa [Fa Yao] (for both Theravada and the two "Big Vehicles"). His book also cites approvals by several established academics who are Buddhologists. Magliola's "Reply" goes on to argue that D'Arcy May's interpretation of the "sensus fidelium" foists the opinions of "white intellectual elites and higher-income Catholics of the North Atlantic tier of countries and their geographical projections--Australia, etc. (only 9 percent of the world's Catholic population) upon the 68 percent of Catholics who live in the global South and East. Magliola's "Reply" also expresses his dismay that D'Arcy May, throughoout his review, dodges the pivotal Derridean notion of "samenesses erected by irreducible difference" though this "thought-motif" constitutes the scaffolding of Magliola's entire book. (shrink)

"Magliola's exposition of Derrida has been acclaimed as the best in English.

This text by an established specialist in French deconstruction, written after his many years in Asia and in the West, celebrates both Buddhist and Christian cultures and the negative but fertile differences between them.

During Jacques Derrida’s earlier phases, his stylistique acts out (in the sense of “performs”) the same project evident in his semantic. Derridean stylistic practice and thematics both undertake the project of deconstructing entitative thinking. Anglophonic philosophers often ignore (or cannot detect) his stylistic games, which are often Talmudic or unique to French. Derrida did not have a Buddhist agenda, but two of my past books, both well-received, show that Derridean deconstruction intersects with Mādhyamikan deconstruction of the self-identical. (Intersection does not (...) imply “common ground” because lines have no width.) This article demonstrates Derridean/buddhist intersections through (1) themes undoing themselves, (2) image motifs undoing themselves, (3) ambiguous referents dissolving Proper Names, (4) the “Uncanny” deconstructing logic, (5) enumeration undoing ontology, and (6) homophones and homographs unsettling correspondence theory. Finally, Derrida’s “free-floating syllables,” “floating graphic traits,” “palindromes,” and “scrambled words” are shown to dissolve entitative constructs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religious Epistemology Through Schillebeeckx and Tibetan Buddhism by Jason VonWachenfeldtRobert MagliolaRELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY THROUGH SCHILLEBEECKX AND TIBETAN BUDDHISM. By Jason VonWachenfeldt. T&T Clark: London, 2021. 240 pp.In his "Introduction," Jason VonWachenfeldt explains the "crisis of authority" experienced by many religious believers, and then commits his book (hereinafter RET) to a "dialogic negotiation" offering middle ways between religious tradition and postmodernity. The "dialogic negotiation" is between the brilliant but controversial (...) Catholic theologian, Edward Schillebeeckx (1914–2009), and the brilliant but controversial Tibetan monk (then ex-monk), Gendun Chopel (1903–1951). They both deconstruct the epistemologies of their respective traditions, but insist on the orthodoxy of their "middle ways."VonWachenfeldt opts for Aaron Stalnaker's methodology of "bridge concepts" (topics enabling interfaith comparison) and the comparison of two "historically situated" individuals (13). He names "religious epistemology" as RET's "bridge-concept," and to further facilitate comparison, three epistemological "categories" are posited: "perspectivalism, hermeneutics, and apophaticism" (64). Schillebeeckx's "phenomenological Thomism" constitutes his perspectivalist first phase, and holds that revelation includes both a "concrete-existential" and non-conceptual "implicit intuition" of the divine reality (32). There is an antinomy between the individual's act of abstraction and the "implicit intuition" of the "reality of God in Godself" (33).Chopel's negative way is more extreme. Chopel is a Madhyamakin but rejects Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka's version which affirms the "conventional validity" of the mundane. For Chopel, all formations lack even conventional validity but "common [End Page 404] beings" falsely affirm them (35). The few "noble ones" (the enlightened) are those aware of pure emptiness (understood as "absence," not "openness"). Schillebeeckx's second phase affirms that one is embedded in ongoing history and cannot escape mundane finitude. God must be seen as "mystery" active within it (45). Chopel's second phase extends the notion that an unbridgeable chasm exists between the conventional and the ultimate but that the Buddha can manipulate the mundane so the leap to enlightenment can occur (49). Schillebeeckx's third phase practices a "negative realist metaphysic": The individual encounters the "really real" external to oneself only by way of "glimpses negative in nature" (58). Chopel's apophaticism describes ultimate reality in terms of a "nonaffirming negative" (63).Next, RET treats the role of religious community in knowledge formation (67). For Schillebeeckx, our "non-divine finitude is precisely the place where the infinite and the finite come most closely into contact" (90). The later Schillebeeckx retains loyalty to the institutional Church but because of the finitude of language and human nature he deems it necessarily subject to critique (92). Chopel practices a "pious skepticism" (97), and increasingly satirizes institutional monasticism (circa 1934, he disrobes). Addressing the role of historical founders of religions, Schillebeeckx maintains that theology should shift from an unsalvageable truth lost in the past to the more eschatological language of "the [always] Coming One" (123). Jesus's epistemological authority does not reside in his ability "to supply answers" as much as it is to open up individuals to "a future reality in the making" (148). Honorific titles such as "Savior" or "Christ" as such are not serviceable. Jesus's story is an exemplar of how to construct meaning in our lives by the "praxis" of helping the suffering. Chopel likewise demythologizes Sakyamuni Buddha (151), but—unlike Schillebeeckx—insists he does so endogenously. For example, he enters the definitive/provisional (nītārtha/neyārtha) debate, but argues that all the teachings of Śākyamuni are both—they are definitive for those whom they help toward emptiness and merely provisional for all others (157, 158).RET's chapter 5 addresses the authority of personal experience in the apophatic knowledge of ultimate reality. How is it possible for "true knowledge" to be "primarily experiential in nature as distinct from being conceptually or linguistically based?" (163). Schillebeeckx holds that our very experience of human finitude brings us negatively in contact with the "unknown ultimate reality itself" (169). He maintains that the apparent lack of ontological contact between beings and ultimate reality (God) is "one-sided," persisting only from the side of our finitude and not from the side of ultimate reality: Though humans can never directly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of ThinkingRobert MagliolaZen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of Thinking. By Carl Olson. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. 309 pp.Carl Olson's Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy compares two paths of liberation from the representational mode of thinking, namely, (...) Zen Buddhism and postmodern philosophy. Olson is to be commended for encouraging this dialogue, especially since professors of religious studies usually marginalize Gallic postmodern thought. He is also to be appreciated for the enormous effort that must have been required to describe so much material. Olson treats Bataille, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Guattari, Foucault, Kristeva, Lacan, Levinas, and Lyotard on the postmodern side; and Dogen, Hakuin, Nishitani, many Chinese Ch'anists, and some Indian Buddhists on the Buddhist side. His method is to arrange the chapters according to topoi such as "Language, Disruption, and Play," "Ways of Thinking," "The Body," and so on, and to treat the pertaining ideas of the individual Buddhist and postmodern authors insofar as applicable.Because Olson's book assembles between two covers the names, selected works, and—at least in a general sense—the "key" ideas of the postmodern movement and their grosso modo similarities/dissimilarities via-à-vis Zen Buddhism, I think it serves an undergraduate readership well enough. The problem is that the book too often performs like a crib sheet in the CliffsNotes manner, reducing so-called "key" ideas to misleading clichés. The book is at its best when it gives an author some length of attention, as it does with Dogen. Rather than reduce my review to a series of sound bites (print bites?) corresponding to Olson's, I shall resort to what hermeneuts call an Auerbachian decoupage, that is, a close analysis of several passages that can be taken as indicative of an author's mode in general. I'll address three interpretations from Olson's book, one of Derrida, one of a Chinese kung-an (koan), and one of Lacan.Within his comparison of Derrida/language/Buddhism, Olson cites (p. 46) a sentence from Derrida's Writing and Difference: "Speech is stolen: since it is stolen [End Page 295] from language it is, thus, stolen from itself, that is, from the thief who has always already lost speech as property and initiative." Olson glosses as follows: "Derrida claims that a speaking subject, representing an irreducible secondary status, is no longer the person who speaks because his/her origin is elusive in an already established field of speech." Because of glosses like this, Derrida is all too often subjected to the ridicule of nonspecialists, who exclaim, "Derrida denies that a person can use speech instrumentally? Aren't his lectures the instruments of his own ideas?" Actually in the section Olson quotes, Derrida is appropriating Lacanian thought and mutating it for Derridean purposes. For Derrida, all life is stretched out in time and diced-out in space in such a way that phenomenological self-identity is an illusion. Physical writing is the best metaphor for this, in that written words (even Chinese ideograms) cannot, in the scientific sense, be perceived in one absolute moment: it "takes time" and it "takes space" to recognize a word, that is, "build" a word-meaning. Derrida calls life a "text" or "writing" because life is like writing: life on the phenomenological level appears holistic (much as a word-meaning appears self-identical, i.e., arising all at once), but life is actually a time/space "drift."1In the sentence Olson quotes, what Derrida means has the following gist: Speech (spoken words) is stolen from language in that it belongs to language as writing and is really writing; and insofar as it is really writing, it is stolen from itself; speech has "always already" been lost to language in that the instrumentality of speech is always undercut by language's nature as writing. Speech is always undercut by an inevitable drift that subverts intentionality and foils our attempts to make speech our absolute "property." This does not mean most of the intention... (shrink)

This important book charts the development of philosophical thinking about history over the past 250 years, combining extracts from key texts with new explanatory and critical discussion. The book is designed to make the work of thinkers such as Hume, Herder, Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault accessible to students with no prior knowledge of Western philosophy. An introductory section is followed by nine further chapters exploring contrasting schools of thought. The volume reveals the origins of contemporary trends in the (...) discipline and relates wider philosophical reflections to the study of history itself. It also points to connections between philosophy of history and literary and cultural theory which have developed in recent decades. (shrink)

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

Robert Stern investigates how scepticism can be countered by using transcendental arguments concerning the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, language, or thought. He shows that the most damaging sceptical questions concern neither the certainty of our beliefs nor the reliability of our belief-forming methods, but rather how we can justify our beliefs.

Permissivism says that for some propositions and bodies of evidence, there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic attitude that can be taken towards that proposition given the evidence. Some critics of this view argue that it condones, as rationally acceptable, sets of attitudes that manifest an untenable kind of arbitrariness. I begin by providing a new and more detailed explication of what this alleged arbitrariness consists in. I then explain why Miriam Schoenfield’s prima facie promising attempt to answer the (...) Arbitrariness Objection, by appealing to the role of epistemic standards in rational belief formation, fails to resolve the problem. Schoenfield’s strategy is, however, a useful one, and I go on to explain how an alternative form of the standards-based approach to Permissivism – one that emphasizes the significance of the relationship between people’s cognitive abilities and the epistemic standards that they employ – can respond to the arbitrariness objection. (shrink)

One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but (...) that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works-the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault"; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world. (shrink)

Classical American pragmatism: the pragmatist -- Enlightenment-and its problematic semantics -- Analyzing pragmatism: pragmatics and pragmatisms -- A Kantian rationalist pragmatism: pragmatism -- Inferentialism, and modality in Sellars's arguments against -- Empiricism -- Linguistic pragmatism and pragmatism about norms: an arc of -- Thought from Rorty's eliminative materialism to his pragmatism -- Vocabularies of pragmatism: synthesizing naturalism and -- Historicism -- Towards an analytic pragmatism: meaning-use analysis -- Pragmatism, expressivism, and anti-representationalism: -- Local and global possibilities.

In his influential article ‘Essence and Modality’, Fine proposes a definition of necessity in terms of the primitive essentialist notion ‘true in virtue of the nature of’. Fine’s proposal is suggestive, but it admits of different interpretations, leaving it unsettled what the precise formulation of an Essentialist definition of necessity should be. In this paper, four different versions of the definition are discussed: a singular, a plural reading, and an existential variant of Fine’s original suggestion and an alternative version proposed (...) by Correia which is not based on Fine’s primitive essentialist notion. The first main point of the paper is that the singular reading is untenable. The second that given plausible background assumptions, the remaining three definitions are extensionally equivalent. The third is that, this equivalence notwithstanding, Essentialists should adopt Correia’s version of the definition, since both the existential variant, which has de facto been adopted as the standard version of the definition in the literature, and the plural reading suffer from problems connected to Fine’s primitive essentialist notion. (shrink)

Epistemic Sentimentalism is the view that emotional experiences such as fear and guilt are a source of immediate justification for evaluative beliefs. For example, guilt can sometimes immediately justify a subject’s belief that they have done something wrong. In this paper I focus on a family of objections to Epistemic Sentimentalism that all take as a premise the claim that emotions possess a normative property that is apparently antithetical to it: epistemic reason-responsiveness, i.e., emotions have evidential bases and justifications can (...) be demanded of them. I respond to these objections whilst granting that emotions are reason-responsive. This is not only dialectically significant vis-à-vis the prospects for Epistemic Sentimentalism, but also supports a broader claim about the compatibility of a mental item’s being reason-responsive and its being a generative source of epistemic justification. (shrink)

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing over two thousand years before Wall Street, called people who engaged in activities which did not contribute to society "parasites." In his latest work, renowned scholar Robert C. Solomon asserts that though capitalism may require capital, but it does not require, much less should it be defined by the parasites it inevitably attracts. Capitalism has succeeded not with brute strength or because it has made people rich, but because it has produced responsible citizens and--however (...) unevenly--prosperous communities. It cannot tolerate a conception of business that focuses solely on income and vulgarity while ignoring traditional virtues of responsibility, community, and integrity. Many feel that there is too much lip-service and not enough understanding of the importance of cooperation and integrity in corporate life. This book rejects the myths and metaphors of war-like competition that cloud business thinking and develops an "Aristotelean" theory of business. The author's approach emphasizes several core concepts: the corporation as community, the search for excellence, the importance of integrity and sound judgment, as well as a more cooperative and humane vision of business. Solomon stresses the virtues of honesty, trust, fairness, and compassion in the competitive business world, and confronts the problem of "moral mazes" and what he posits as its solution--moral courage. (shrink)

A sourcebook for developing and facilitating collaborative groups capable of continuously adapting to anticipate the evolving learning needs of students. Based on a theoretical foundation of schools as complex systems in which linear management models are no longer sufficient.

This paper concerns the applications of two-dimensional modal semantics to the explanation of the contents of speech and thought. Different interpretations and applications of the apparatus are contrasted. First, it is argued that David Kaplan's two-dimensional semantics for indexical expressions is different from the use that I made of a formally similar framework to represent the role of contingent information in the determination of what is said. But the two applications are complementary rather than conflicting. Second, my interpretation of the (...) apparatus is contrasted with that of David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, and David Lewis. It is argued that this difference reflects a contrast between internalist and externalist approaches to the problem of intentionality. (shrink)

This paper examines two recent contributions to the hate speech literature – by Steven Heyman and Jeremy Waldron – which seek a justification for the legal restriction of hate speech in an account of the way that hate speech infringes against people’s dignity. These analyses look beyond the first-order hurts and disadvantages suffered by the immediate targets of hate speech, and consider the prospect of hate speech sustaining complex social structures whose wide-scale operations lower the social status of members of (...) targeted groups. In Heyman’s and Waldron’s accounts we find plausible insights into the nature of identity-based social hierarchies, and the harms that redound to subordinated people under the operations of such hierarchies. I argue, however, that both analyses are unsuccessful as justifications for the restriction of hate speech, because they do not ultimately provide reason to think that hate speech is responsible for creating or sustaining identity-based social hierarchies. (shrink)

What, if anything, do we epistemically owe to each other? Various “traditional” views of epistemology might hold either that we don’t epistemically owe anything to each other, because “what we owe to each other” is the realm of the moral, or that what we epistemically owe to each other is just to be epistemically responsible agents. Basu (2019) has recently argued, against such views, that morality makes extra-epistemic demands upon what we should believe about one another. So, what we owe (...) to each other is not just a matter of word and deed, but also of belief. And in fact, Basu argues, sometimes those moral demands require us to believe in ways that cut against orthodox epistemic norms. This paper has three aims. First, to offer two strategies for accommodating the kinds of cases Basu discusses while nonetheless holding that only epistemic normativity makes demands on belief. Second, to offer an alternative account of what we owe to each other that does not hold that morality demands that we sometimes believe against our evidence or in violation of epistemic norms. And third, to give a brief diagnosis of why it seems intuitive that morality makes extra-epistemic doxastic demands on us. Ultimately, I argue that what we epistemically owe to each other does not require us to violate orthodox, invariantist epistemic norms. Morality demands that we have a proper regard for others, not that we sometimes believe against our evidence. (shrink)

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of (...) Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

The Joy of Philosophy is a return to some of the perennial questions of philosophy--questions about the meaning of life; about death and tragedy; about the respective roles of rationality and passion in the good life; about love, compassion, and revenge; about honesty, deception, and betrayal; and about who we are and how we think about who we are. Recapturing the heart-felt confusion and excitement that originally brings us all to philosophy, internationally renowned teacher and lecturer Robert C. Solomon (...) offers both a critique of contemporary philosophy and an invitation to engage in philosophy in a different way. He attempts to save philosophy from itself and its self-imposed diet of thin arguments and logical analysis to recover the richness and complexity of life in thought. Solomon defends the passionate life in contrast to the life of thoughtful contemplation idealized by so many philosophers, attempting to recapture the kind of philosophy that Nietzsche celebrated as a "joyful wisdom.". (shrink)

Exponents and critics of semantic presupposition have almost invariably based their discussion on the ('Standard') definition of presupposition implied by Frege and Strawson. In this study Noel Burton-Roberts argues convincingly against this definition, that leads it to a three-valued semantics. He presents a very simple semantic definition which is weaker, more general and leads to a semantics more easily interpreted as two-valued with gaps. The author shows that a wide range of intuitive facts that eluded the Standard definition follow directly (...) from this ('Revised') definition itself: facts about the presuppositions of compound sentences and modal sentences, about presuppositional conflict and about differences in the logical status of simple sentences suffering from presupposition failure. The book includes a detailed argument that an ambiguity of natural language negation, generally assumed to be necessary to the defence of semantic presupposition, is neither possible nor necessary in a presuppositional semantics. Noel Burton-Roberts has made an authoritative contribution to a debate which has involved philosophers and linguists for many years. His command of the issues, his clarity of exposition and his theoretical insight may well serve to change the boundaries of that debate. (shrink)

We make the case that the Prisoner’s Dilemma, notwithstanding its fame and the quantity of intellectual resources devoted to it, has largely failed to explain any phenomena of social scientific or biological interest. In the heart of the paper we examine in detail a famous purported example of Prisoner’s Dilemma empirical success, namely Axelrod’s analysis of WWI trench warfare, and argue that this success is greatly overstated. Further, we explain why this negative verdict is likely true generally and not just (...) in our case study. We also address some possible defenses of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. (shrink)

In disagreements about trivial matters, it often seems appropriate for disputing parties to adopt a ‘middle ground’ view about the disputed matter. But in disputes about more substantial controversies (e.g. in ethics, religion, or politics) this sort of doxastic conduct can seem viciously acquiescent. How should we distinguish between the two kinds of cases, and thereby account for our divergent intuitions about how we ought to respond to them? One possibility is to say that ceding ground in a trivial dispute (...) is appropriate because the disputing parties are usually epistemic peers within the relevant domain, whereas in a more substantial disagreement the disputing parties rarely, if ever, qualify as epistemic peers, and so ‘sticking to one’s guns’ is usually the appropriate doxastic response. My aim in this paper is to explain why this way of drawing the desired distinction is ultimately problematic, even if it seems promising at first blush. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between eugenics, disability, and dehumanization, with a focus on forms of eugenics beyond Nazi eugenics.

Comprehensie collection of historical and contemporary philosophies of technology, including Plato, Aristotle, St. Simon, Comte, Marx, Heidegger, Mumford, Foucault.