This moral philosophy text with readings embraces Socrates' observation that ethics is "no small matter, but how we ought to live." How ought we to live? This hard question captures the full range of moral inquiry from traditional moral theory to contemporary moral issues, such as abortion, capital punishment, and war. But there is much more to moral philosophy: How should we be as people? When should we forgive? Are we capable of morality? What about non-western ethics? And most distressing (...) of all, why be moral in the first place? These and other challenging questions show the profundity and inescapable importance of moral philosophy for a life worth living. Life's Hardest Questions combines lively and informative introductory discussions with classic and contemporary writings in moral philosophy. (shrink)

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better if we were immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Life, Death, and Meaning brings together key readings, primarily by English-speaking philosophers, on such 'big questions.'.

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

"Peter Iver Kaufman is admirably and ideally qualified to undertake this project of reading More on politics in the light of Augustine on politics. In vigorous, well-paced prose, he tackles an important and original subject." —_Marcia L. Colish, Frederick B. Artz Professor of History, emerita, Oberlin College_ _“Incorrectly Political_ will attract readers not only because it is written with the author's characteristic flair and liveliness, but also because of his established capacity to bridge centuries of Western thought and (...) history. Written at the dawn of the new century, this book acquires deep resonance from the events unfolding around the world, circumstances to which Augustine’s and More's complex thoughts on political possibility still speak. If ever a study of such hoary figures from the Christian past deserved the label 'timely,' it is surely this one.” —_Kevin Madigan, Harvard University Divinity School_ Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries and Thomas More in the sixteenth were familiar with the deceits and illusions that enabled even the most vile rulers to shore up their dignity and that gave repressive regimes an inviolability of sorts. Both men knew the politics of their times, both were involved in politics, and both were at one time politically ambitious. Augustine needed and made good use of government's powers of coercion and damage control in his struggle against the Donatists. The clear advantages of political protection and correction preoccupied More in his battle against Martin Luther. Both later changed their minds and believed, finally, the political imagination, based as it is on a desire for power, always and inevitably leads to devastation and suffering. Peter Iver Kaufman explains how and why we have failed to appreciate Augustine's and More's profound political pessimism, reintroducing readers to two of the Christian tradition's most enigmatic yet influential figures. Each had been disturbed by the reach of his own political ambitions—as by those of contemporaries. Each knew that government was useful—yet always deceitful. And each wrote a classic—widely read to this day, Augustine's _City of God_ and More's _Utopia,_as well as abundant correspondence and polemical tracts to explain why government on earth might be used, though never meaningfully improved. (shrink)

Differing findings exist on how Defining Issues Test (DIT) scores relate to intelligence. Further study is needed in order to address aspects of intellect not previously considered and to address how these relationships rival studies that have compared indices of intellect with constructs similar to DIT scores. In the present study, a sample of 117 participants completed the DIT and the Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test (KAIT), which assesses crystallised and fluid intelligence. Structural equation modelling offered supporting evidence (...) that these measurements represent separate sources of information. Statistically significant paths from KAIT crystallised indices to DIT scores were seen, though there was much overlap. Negligible paths were seen from KAIT fluid indices to DIT scores in the sample overall though this relationship strengthens when advanced moral judgement development is considered. Thus, the present study affirms the DIT's construct validity and illustrates how crystallised and fluid intellectual abilities pertain to DIT scores. (shrink)

This study examines the philosophical foundations of Hegel's social theory by articulating the normative standards at work in his claim that the central social institutions of the modern era are rational or good.

The Fate of Reason is the first general history devoted to the period between Kant and Fichte, one of the most revolutionary and fertile in modern philosophy. The philosophers of this time broke with the two central tenets of the modem Cartesian tradition: the authority of reason and the primacy of epistemology. They also witnessed the decline of the Aufkldrung, the completion of Kant's philosophy, and the beginnings of post-Kantian idealism. Thanks to Beiser we can newly appreciate the influence of (...) Kant's critics on the development of his philosophy. Beiser brings the controversies, and the personalities who engaged in them, to life and tells a story that has uncanny parallels with the debates of the present. (shrink)

Deleuze, The Dark Precursor is organized around three themes that critically overlap: dialectic, structure, and being.

This book is addressed to readers who have laid the foundation of a liberal education & are beginning the special study of law.

The doctrine of karma and rebirth is often praised for its ability to offer a successful solution to the Problem of Evil. This essay evaluates such a claim by considering whether the doctrine can function as a systematic theodicy, as an explanation of all human suffering in terms of wrongs done in either this or past lives. This purported answer to the Problem of Evil must face a series of objections, including the problem of anylackofmemoryofpastlives,the lack of proportionality between wrongdoing (...) and the observed suffering in the world, the problem of infinite regress of explanation, and the problem of compatibility of free will with karmic determinism. These objections, either separately or taken together, provide sufficient reason to doubt whether the doctrine of karma and rebirth can in fact provide a satisfactory theodicy. (shrink)

The problem of punishment -- Punishment as crime prevention -- Can retributive punishment be justified? -- The mixed theory of punishment -- Retribution and revenge -- What is the purpose of retribution? -- Making sense of honor -- Is punishment justified?

Artificial intelligence is a general-purpose technology (GPT), term given to technologies that shape an entire era and reorient innovations by reconfiguring the economy’s logic and functioning and bringing in new business models. AI offers unprecedented opportunities and risks. The benefits of AI are extraordinary, as are its potential harms. Potential damage does not have the same degree of problematization, since the intensity and extent of the damage varies according to the domain and the object of application. To address the scale (...) of this challenge, regulation is necessary but not sufficient. Standards, unwritten codes of compliance and arbitration procedures, supervision and auditability, AI governance, international agreements, compliance with current local and global standards and laws. All of this needs to be integrated. Society seems to have no alternative to facing the challenges of at least mitigating the damage already identified and trying to predict future damage in advance. The purpose of this article is to encourage reflection regarding the main initiatives that are available to society to protect its citizens and organizations from the potential harm caused by AI models, vis-à-vis the technology’s own limits to act in ethical and legal compliance. (shrink)

A Pulitzer Prize–winning dance critic teaches us to appreciate—and enact—grace in every dimension, from the physical to the emotional. Grace has long been taught as essential to civilized living. The Three Graces—goddesses of charm, beauty, and creativity—exemplify ease and harmony with one another and the world around them. But what has happened to this simple, marvelous concept of being at ease in the world? With warmth, humor, and an ever-perceptive eye, Sarah L. Kaufman sifts the graceful from the graceless, (...) celebrating heart-catching moments of physical elegance in sports, movies, dance, fashion, and music; rare sightings of celebrity grace; the secrets of gracious hosts; and grace found unexpectedly, in the kitchen of a high-end restaurant and among strippers in a basement bar. Kaufman’s thought-provoking reflections on these physical and social acts of grace offer hope for even the clumsiest, most awkward among us. Guided by the muse of Cary Grant (with further inspiration from Smokey Robinson, Roger Federer, Nelson Mandela, Margot Fonteyn, Amy Purdy, Beyoncé, and others), Kaufman illuminates the importance of grace in the small moments of everyday life. In The Art of Grace, she inspires us to walk taller, spend time on unnecessary kindnesses, and celebrate the grace notes in our lives and those of others. (shrink)

During his more than fifty-year writing and teaching career, Horace M. Kallen (1882-1974), the American Jewish philosopher who coined the term "cultural pluralism," incorporated into his pragmatism-infused philosophy of life a number of different sciences, from racial science to psychology and physics. Part biography, part cultural history, "Horace Kallen Confronts America" offers fresh insight into the larger question of how social discourses shape modern American Jewish identity.

The Seventeenth century is one of the most important periods in the history of Western philosophy, witnessing philosophical, scientific, religious and social change on a massive scale. In spite of this, there are remarkably few comprehensive, single volume surveys of the period as a whole. The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy is an outstanding and comprehensive survey of this momentous period, covering the major thinkers, topics and movements in Seventeenth century philosophy. It is divided into seven parts: Historical Context (...) Metaphysics Epistemology Mind and Language Moral and Political Philosophy Natural Philosophy and Mathematics Philosophical Theology. An outstanding team of international contributors provide students and scholars of philosophy and related disciplines with a superb guide to Seventeenth century philosophy. Additional features include annotated further reading at the end of each chapter and biographical entries on the most important philosophers. (shrink)

Through a series of provocative conversations, Frederick Luis Aldama and Herbert Lindenberger, who have written widely on literature, film, music, and art, locate a place for the discomforting and the often painfully unpleasant within aesthetics. The conversational format allows them to travel informally across many centuries and many art forms. They have much to tell one another about the arts since the advent of modernism soon after 1900—the nontonal music, for example, of the Second Vienna School, the chance-directed music (...) and dance of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, the in-your-faceness of such diverse visual artists as Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, and Damien Hirst. They demonstrate as well a long tradition of discomforting art stretching back many centuries, for example, in the Last Judgments of innumerable Renaissance painters, in Goya’s so-called “black” paintings, in Wagner’s Tristan chord, and in the subtexts of Shakespearean works such as King Lear and Othello. This book is addressed at once to scholars of literature, art history, musicology, and cinema. Although its conversational format eschews the standard conventions of scholarly argument, it provides original insights both into particular art forms and into individual works within these forms. Among other matters, it demonstrates how recent work in neuroscience may provide insights in the ways that consumers process difficult and discomforting works of art. The book also contributes to current aesthetic theory by charting the dialogue that goes on—especially in aesthetically challenging works—between creator, artifact, and consumer. (shrink)

A noticeable shift in focus has occurred in public discourse from What is our best course of action? to What are the true facts of the situation? At the center of these debates are questions on the proper use of evidence, Legal scholar Schauer offers clarity based on how legal systems grapple with these questions-and by drawing insights from psychology, philosophy, economics, history, and decision theory.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Aim of Hegel's Science of Society The Method of Hegel's Science of Society Comprehension versus Critique.

Gilles Deleuze is considered one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. Eleanor Kaufman situates Deleuze in relation to others of his generation, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and she engages the provocative readings of Deleuze by Alain Badiou and Slavoj ?i?ek. Deleuze, The Dark Precursor is organized around three themes that critically overlap: dialectic, structure, and being. Kaufman argues that Deleuze's work is deeply concerned with these concepts, even (...) when he advocates for the seemingly opposite notions of univocity, nonsense, and becoming. By drawing on scholastic thought and reading somewhat against the grain, Kaufman suggests that these often-maligned themes allow for a nuanced, even positive reflection on apparently negative states of being, such as extreme inertia. This attention to the negative or minor category has implications that extend beyond philosophy and into feminist theory, film, American studies, anthropology, and architecture. (shrink)

On November 11 and 12, 2011, a symposium held at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill honored John M. Headley, Emeritus Professor of History. The organizers, Professor MelissaBullard—Headley’s colleague in the department of history at that university—along with ProfessorsPaul Grendler (University of Toronto) and James Weiss (Boston College), as well as Nancy GraySchoonmaker, coordinator of the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies—assembled presenters, respondents, and dozens of other participants from Western Europe and North America to celebrate the (...) career of their prolific, versatile, and influential colleague whose publications challenged and often changed the ways scholars think about Martin Luther, Thomas More, the Habsburg empire,early modern Catholicism, globalization, and multiculturalism.This special issue contains the major papers delivered at the symposium, revised to take account of colleagues’ suggestions at the conference and thereafter.^John O’Malley studies the censorship ofsacred art with special reference to Michelangelo’s famed “Last Judgment” and the Council of Trent.John Martin sifts Montaigne’s skepticism about contemporaneous strategies for self-disclosure andself-discipline. Stressing the significance of grammar, Constantin Fasolt helps us recapture theRenaissance’s and the early modern religious reformations’ disagreements with antiquity. RonaldWitt’s reappraisal of humanist historiography probes Petrarch’s perspectives on ancient Rome. JohnMcManamon includes tales of theft and market manipulation in his study of the early moderncollection and circulation of books and manuscripts, the commodification of study. To “nuance” John Headley’s conclusions about “the Europeanization of the world,” Jerry Bentley repossesses the influence of other than European societies on several European theorists of human rights.^Kate Lowe’s remarks on the reconstruction of race in the Renaissance explores the effects of a critical mistranslation on what being black was taken to mean by Europeans. David Gilmartin introduces readers to the shape of democracy in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, as well as to the understandings of popular sovereignty that affected elections, suggesting strides that scholars might take “toward a worldwide history of voting”.The remarkable range of these contributions comes close to reflecting the range of ProfessorHeadley’s interests and achievements, which James M. Weiss maps in his tribute, identifying“unifying themes” in Headley’s work. (shrink)

This chapter attempts to unravel the differences, whether real or merely apparent, between Chomsky's linguistics and usage‐based linguistics (UBL). The principal alternative to generative grammar in the world today is a broad umbrella of approaches that fall under the general heading of UBL. UBL is the successor to a Piagetian approach to language acquisition, where experience and general learning principles shape the acquisition process. Functionalism takes the position that properties of grammatical systems are explicable in terms of properties of systems (...) that lie outside of grammar per se. The chapter discusses that the few direct references Chomsky has made to usage‐based linguistics. It presents the most important issues, one‐by‐one, that separate Chomsky's views from those of UBLists. They are the explananda of linguistic theory, grammar design and architecture, semantics, language acquisition and innately‐provided linguistic constructs, functional explanation, and the sources of data on which a linguistic theory might be constructed. (shrink)

This book locates the paradoxical process of collecting (as an activity that necessarily involves displacement and dispersal) in the ways nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language literature (and in one case, cinema) attempts to represent ephemeral, discarded, and trivial things.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This book compares two competing theories of human nature: the more traditional theory espoused in different forms by centuries of western philosophy and the newer, Darwinian model. In the traditional view, the human being is a hybrid being, with a lower, animal nature and a higher, rational or “spiritual” component. The competing Darwinian account does away with the idea of a higher nature and attempts to provide a complete reduction of human nature to the evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction. (...) Whitley Kaufman presents the case that the traditional conception, regardless of one's religious views or other beliefs, provides a superior account of human nature and culture. We are animals, but we are also rational animals. Kaufman explores the most fundamental philosophical questions as they relate to this debate over human nature—for example: Is free will an illusion? Is morality a product of evolution, with no objective basis? Is reason merely a tool for promoting reproductive success? Is art an adaptation for attracting mates? Is there any higher meaning or purpose to human life? Human Nature and the Limits of Darwinism aims to assess the competing views of human nature and present a clear account of the issues on this most pressing of questions. It engages in a close analysis of the numerous recent attempts to explain all human aims in terms of Darwinian processes and presents the arguments in support of the traditional conception of human nature. (shrink)

The notions of duty and obligation constitute the central focus of Rawls's account of political authority. This chapter examines Rawls's accounts of (1) the justification of political authority; (2) the essential elements of a just constitutional regime; (3) the conditions under which resistance to just institutions is permissible or required; and (4) the conditions under which institutions cease to deserve fidelity and obedience. It commences with Rawls's accounts of duty and obligation, focusing on his accounts of (1) the duties and (...) obligation of citizens; and (2) the duty to obey unjust laws. Rawls discusses two instances in which certain forms of resistance are justifiable: civil disobedience; and conscientious refusal. Rawls's account continues to be oriented by the underlying notion that the legitimate exercise of coercive political power must be justifiable on terms that persons subject to that power can affirm on due reflection. (shrink)

A critique of the hypothesis of extended cognition.

Ethics and Responsibilities of Engineers is designed to help students and new practitioners understand from where ethics originate and how they have developed in the profession. It is written to help engineers understand how the coursework they take in school aligns with the public good. What separates this book from others is the focus on the historical development of ethics for the profession and the role played by our educational system, accreditation commissions, and licensing boards. The knowledge and regulatory basis (...) for the engineering occupation permits engineers to comprehend and address (and thereby often avoid) the challenges that might compromise the image of engineers in society. The trust that the public has in their judgment to protect and serve society is what allows engineers to be held in high esteem. (shrink)

A college-level introductory text in Christian social ethics that combines theory, cases, and analysis.

A profound, valuable, scholarly study of theology from a cogent well- written Jewish perspective, exposing the arrogant disregard the "New Atheists" bring to the God-controversy by their collective neglect of the great variety of God- concepts embodied in the works of Jewish theologians.

This is the opening chapter to The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays. It argues that since creativity is such a significant aspect of the human experience, and since it raises a wealth of philosophical questions, it deserves much more attention than it currently receives in philosophy. It also argues for the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary exchange, integrating philosophical insights with research in experimental psychology. Providing an overview of the field and of the subsequent essays in the volume, this chapter surveys issues (...) such as the definition of creativity, the role of consciousness in the creative process, the role of the audience in the creation of art, the emergence of creativity through childhood pretense, whether great works of literature give us insight into human nature, whether a computer program can really be creative, whether creativity is a virtue, the difference between creativity in science and art, and whether creativity can be taught—both in general and within philosophy itself. (shrink)

Fred Stoutland was a major figure in the philosophy of action and philosophy of language. This collection brings together essays on truth, language, action and mind and thus provides an important summary of many key themes in Stoutland’s own work, as well as offering valuable perspectives on key issues in contemporary philosophy.