How we look at the world is informed mainly by our assumptions and the ways in which we rationalise them. Seldom do we rely-or allow ourselves to rely-on 'gut thinking' or intuition. INTENDING THE WORLD shows how rationalism, which is our primary approach in thinking about world affairs, is in crisis. By studying the world rationalistically, we objectify it and we look at it as detached from ourselves. But in doing so, we cease to see that we are using a (...) perspective that limits as well as enlightens. In a disciplinary first, Ralph Pettman provides an account of twenty-first century international relations in terms of phenomenology-one of the main philosophical attempts to compensate for these limits. He explores how this re-embedded use of reason can successfully describe and explain world affairs in ways unused by rationalists. INTENDING THE WORLD follows the lead of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. It looks at the world not only in terms of things-in-themselves, but also in terms of why it is we keep willing the world the way we do. (shrink)

Fully accessible to students and scholars alike, this engaging book introduces the constructivist approach to understanding world affairs.

This book provides an overview of the entire discipline of world affairs in a way that makes immediate sense. It is also a critique of the limits that rationalism sets on how we know world affairs, showing how we might transcend these limits by augmenting rationalist research with non-rationalist techniques. It should appeal to anyone interested in why analysts so often seem to explain world affairs inaccurately and misunderstand what these affairs mean.

Can love really be considered another form of technology? Dominic Pettman says it can - although not before carefully redefining technology as a cultural challenge to what we mean by the "human" in the information age. Using the writings of such important thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-LucNancy, and Bernard Stiegler as a springboard, Pettman explores the "techtonic" movements of contemporary culture, specifically in relation to the language of eros. Highly ritualized expressions of desire - love, in other words (...) - always reveal an era's attitude toward what it means to exist as a selfamong others. For Pettman, the articulation of love is a technique of belonging: a way of responding to the basic plurality of everyone's identity, a process that becomes increasingly complex as the forms of mediated communication, from cell phone and text messaging to the mass media, multiply andmesh together.Wresting the idea of love from the arthritic hands of Romanticism, Pettman demonstrates the ways in which this dynamic assemblage - "the stirrings of the soul" - have always been a matter of tools, devices, prosthetics, and media. Love is, after all, something we make. And, love, this book argues,is not eternal, but external. (shrink)

Let us take an example that Bernard Williams (1981: 102) made famous. Suppose that you want a gin and tonic, and you believe that the stuff in front of you is gin. In fact, however, the stuff is not gin but petrol. So if you drink the stuff (even mixed with tonic), it will be decidedly unpleasant, to say the least. Should you choose to drink the stuff or not?

An early work in which Baudrillard became Baudrillard. When Fatal Strategies was first published in French in 1983, it represented a turning point for Jean Baudrillard: an utterly original, and for many readers, utterly bizarre book that offered a theory as proliferative, ecstatic, and hallucinatory as the postmodern world it endeavored to describe. Arguing against the predetermined outcomes of dialectical thought with his renowned, wry, ambivalent passion, with this volume Jean Baudrillard mounted an attack against the “false problems” posed by (...) Western philosophy. If his Marxist days were firmly behind him, Baudrillard here indicated that metaphysics had also gone the way of sociology and politics: the contemporary world demanded nothing less than Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry's absurdist philosphy that described the laws of the universe supplementary to this one. In effect, with Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard became Baudrillard. In his extrapolationist manner, Baudrillard sought to replace Western philosophy's circular arguments with a ritualistic Theater of Cruelty. Using this line of thought developed in Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard went on, throughout the 1980s, to find new and shatteringly accurate ways of discussing American corporatocracy, arms build-up, and hostage taking. Fatal Strategies asserts a profound critique of American politics, and it is an important step towards his examination of evil.Jean Baudrillard was a philosopher, sociologist, cultural critic, and theorist of postmodernity who challenged all existing theories of contemporary society with humor and precision. An outsider in the French intellectual establishment, he was internationally renowned as a twenty-first century visionary, reporter, and provocateur. His Simulations instantly became a cult classic and made him a controversial voice in the world of politics and art. (shrink)

In The Demoralization of Western Culture Ralph Fevre undertakes an explanation of these difficulties.

We defend a functionalist approach to emotion that begins by focusing on emotions as central states with causal connections to behavior and to other cognitive states. The approach brackets the conscious experience of emotion, lists plausible features that emotions exhibit, and argues that alternative schemes are unpromising candidates. We conclude with the benefits of our approach: one can study emotions in animals; one can look in the brain for the implementation of specific features; and one ends up with an architecture (...) of the mind in which emotions are fully accommodated through their relations to the rest of cognition. Our article focuses on arguing for this general approach; as such, it is an essay in the philosophy of emotion rather than in the psychology or neuroscience of emotion. (shrink)

Intuitively, it seems that some belief-forming practices have the following three properties: 1. They are rational practices, and the beliefs that we form by means of these practices are themselves rational or justified beliefs. 2. Even if in most cases these practices reliably lead to correct beliefs (i.e., beliefs in true propositions), they are not infallible: it is possible for beliefs that are formed by means of these practices to be incorrect (i.e., to be beliefs in false propositions). 3. The (...) rationality of these practices is basic or primitive. That is, the rationality of these practices is not due simply to the availability, by means of some process of reasoning that relies purely on other practices, of a rational or justified belief in the reliability of these practices. -/- How can there be such practices? This paper offers an answer to that question. (shrink)

What exactly is the human element separating humans from animals and machines? The common answers that immediately come to mind—like art, empathy, or technology—fall apart under close inspection. Dominic Pettman argues that it is a mistake to define such rigid distinctions in the first place, and the most decisive “human error” may be the ingrained impulse to understand ourselves primarily in contrast to our other worldly companions. In _Human Error_, Pettman describes the three sides of the cybernetic triangle—human, (...) animal, and machine—as a rubric for understanding key figures, texts, and sites where our species-being is either reinforced or challenged by our relationship to our own narcissistic technologies. Consequently, species-being has become a matter of _specious_-being, in which the idea of humanity is not only a case of mistaken identity but indeed the mistake of identity. _Human Error_ boldly insists on the necessity of relinquishing our anthropomorphism but also on the extreme difficulty of doing so, given how deeply this attitude is bound with all our other most cherished beliefs about forms of life. (shrink)

Hierocles, a Stoic of the second century CE, famously deployed an image of the ‘concentric circles’ that surround each of us. The image should not be read as advocating absolute impartiality (in the style of classical utilitarianism) or as illustrating the Stoic theory of oikeiōsis. Instead, it is designed to illustrate how it is ‘appropriate to act’ in certain cases. Like other Stoics, Hierocles bases his investigation of appropriate acts on what is ‘in accordance with nature’. According to his view, (...) each of us has a duty of mutual aid towards every other human being—but a weightier duty towards those who are socially closer than those who are more distant. The fundamental principle is that each of us has the duty of being an ‘ally’ of every other human being in serving the natural purposes of all the circles to which we and that other human being both belong. (shrink)

Most approaches to animal ethics ground the moral standing of nonhumans in some appeal to their capacities for intelligent autonomy or mental sentience. _Corporal Compassion _emphasizes the phenomenal and somatic commonality of living beings; a philosophy of body that seeks to displace any notion of anthropomorphic empathy in viewing the moral experiences of nonhuman living beings. Ralph R. Acampora employs phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism and deconstruction to connect and contest analytic treatments of animal rights and liberation theory. In doing so, (...) he focuses on issues of being and value, and posits a felt nexus of bodily being, termed symphysis, to devise an interspecies ethos. Acampora uses this broad-based bioethic to engage in dialogue with other strains of environmental ethics and ecophilosophy. _Corporal Compassion_ examines the practical applications of the somatic ethos in contexts such as laboratory experimentation and zoological exhibition, and challenges practitioners to go beyond recent reforms and look to a future beyond exploitation or total noninterference--a posthumanist culture that advocates caring in a participatory approach. (shrink)

There is a popular conception among many Zeitgeist watchers, especially in places like the US, Western Europe and Australia, of the urbanized East as existing somehow further into the future. As William Gibson once stated: `The future is here; it just isn't equally distributed yet.' This kind of cultural fetishism extends to not only technolust, but the practices that new gadgets and electronics encourage. The specific phenomenon explored in this article is that of virtual girlfriends and boyfriends: whether in the (...) form of avatars or automated SMS text messages. This particularly Japanese `craze', if we can call it that, fascinates and appals people who still hold P2P romance IRL in high-esteem. It seems like an insult to the intrinsically human and humanist discourse of courtship; and indeed it is. How does this perspective change, however, if we consider `love' as a technology? That is, as both a code with its own algorithmic parameters, and a discourse that also challenges the hyper-rational assumptions of the `merely machinic'. Extending the argument articulated in my book, Love and Other Technologies, this article asks how the emergence of virtual dating and other techno-inflected treatments of romance are working to undo our jealously held notions of intimacy and identity. It concludes that all sex can be considered cybersex, given the communication flows that occur both before, during and after the act. For, as we continue to enframe the discourse of intimacy via new and mobile media, we find it increasingly difficult to deny that intensified inter-subjectivity is always already a matter of technics. Indeed, what Heidegger says of modern technology can effectively be applied to modern love: that it embodies an `unreasonable demand' of nature (and thus has the capacity to reveal something essential about the posthuman condition). (shrink)

Here is a definition of knowledge: for you to know a proposition p is for you to have an outright belief in p that is correct precisely because it manifests the virtue of rationality. This definition resembles Ernest Sosa’s “virtue theory”, except that on this definition, the only virtue that must be manifested in all instances of knowledge is rationality, and no reductive account of rationality is attempted—rationality is assumed to be an irreducibly normative notion. This definition is compatible with (...) “internalism” about rationality, and with a form of “pragmatic encroachment” on the conditions of rational outright belief. An interpretation is given of this definition, and especially of the sense of ’because’ that it involves. On this interpretation, this definition entails that both safety and adherence are necessary conditions on knowledge; it supports a kind of contextualism about terms like ‘knowledge’; and it provides resources to defend safety, adherence, and contextualism, against some recent objections. (shrink)

83 The SHIP-MASTER'S ASSISTANT, and OWNER'S MA- NUAL ; containing general Information necessary for Merchants, Owners, and Masters of Ships, Officers, ...

In this paper, I apply the "conceptual role semantics" approach that I have proposed elsewhere (according to which the meaning of normative terms is given by their role in practical reasoning or deliberation) to the meaning of the term 'ought'. I argue that this approach can do three things: It can give an adequate explanation of the special connection that normative judgments have to practical reasoning and motivation for action. It can give an adequate account of why the central principles (...) of deontic logic are correct. It can give an explanation of the precise ways in which the term 'ought' is systematically context-sensitive, so that the term expresses different (but systematically related) concepts in different contexts. (shrink)

Most approaches to animal ethics ground the moral standing of nonhumans in some appeal to their capacities for intelligent autonomy or mental sentience. _Corporal Compassion _emphasizes the phenomenal and somatic commonality of living beings; a philosophy of body that seeks to displace any notion of anthropomorphic empathy in viewing the moral experiences of nonhuman living beings. Ralph R. Acampora employs phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism and deconstruction to connect and contest analytic treatments of animal rights and liberation theory. In doing so, (...) he focuses on issues of being and value, and posits a felt nexus of bodily being, termed symphysis, to devise an interspecies ethos. Acampora uses this broad-based bioethic to engage in dialogue with other strains of environmental ethics and ecophilosophy. _Corporal Compassion_ examines the practical applications of the somatic ethos in contexts such as laboratory experimentation and zoological exhibition, and challenges practitioners to go beyond recent reforms and look to a future beyond exploitation or total noninterference--a posthumanist culture that advocates caring in a participatory approach. (shrink)

First published in 1931, A Study in the Philosophy of Malebranche examines the theories which constitute the philosophical system of Malebranche. Church specifically analyses theories pertaining to Malebranche's vision in god; knowledge; occasionalism; and imagination and sense.

Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688) deserves recognition as one of the most important English seventeenth-century philosophers after Hobbes and Locke. In opposition to Hobbes, Cudworth proposes an innatist theory of knowledge which may be contrasted with the empirical position of his younger contemporary Locke, and in moral philosophy he anticipates the ethical rationalists of the eighteenth century. A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality is his most important work, and this volume makes it available, together with his shorter Treatise of Freewill, (...) in its first modern edition, with a historical introduction, a chronology of his life, and an essay on further reading. (shrink)

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer or Luiz Pessoa. Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. But our version of functionalism (...) is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that contemporary media technologies push individuals into collective action on an industrial scale, without them necessarily being aware of it. Yet what if the problem is not that we are all synchronized to the same affective networks and moments, but rather dispersed into countless different networks and moments? What if the effect of so-called social media is to calibrate the interactive spectacle so that we never fully feel the same way as other potential allies at the (...) same moment? While one person is fuming about economic injustice or climate change denial, another is giggling at a cute cat video, and, two hours late, vice versa. The nebulous indignation which constitutes the very fuel of true social change can be redirected safely around the network, avoiding any dangerous surges of radical activity In this short and provocative book Dominic Pettman examines the deliberate deployment of what he calls ‘asynchronous hypermodulation’, as a key strategy encoded into the contemporary media environment. By focusing on ‘we, the mediated’, this radical intervention challenges the narratives that portray the new media environment as a monolithic media apparatus, rendering us all into the same libidinal grey glue, subsequently channelled at will through the pleasure palace of the internet. The unprecedented power of the Internet requires us to rethink the potential for infinite distractions that accompany it. (shrink)

Richard Price’s moral epistemology provides a distinctive account, not only of the sources of our moral knowledge, but also of its limits – that is, of the moral truths that we do not and even cannot know. According to this moral epistemology, the fundamental moral truths are necessary rather than contingent; if they are knowable at all, they are knowable a priori. In general, fundamental moral truths are akin to mathematical truths. Specifically, these necessary moral truths are grounded in the (...) essences of act-types, which are knowable through ‘intuition’ if knowable at all. However, Price firmly rejects utilitarianism, recognizing several different ‘branches of virtue’, which can conflict with each other. As he argues, we cannot know the truth about act-types that exemplify such conflicting branches of virtue if the competing considerations are too finely balanced. This view of moral epistemology is compared with those of several other philosophers, including W. D. Ross. It is argued that Price has a more unified view than Ross: for Price, all moral knowledge flows from a priori intuition, but this is compatible with our being ignorant of many of the fine details of the fundamental truths of morality. (shrink)

Often, when one faces a choice between alternative actions, there are reasons both for and against each alternative. On one way of understanding these words, what one “ought to do all things considered (ATC)” is determined by the totality of these reasons. So, these reasons can somehow be “combined” or “aggregated” to yield an ATC verdict on these alternatives. First, various assumptions about this sort of aggregation of reasons are articulated. Then it is shown that these assumptions allow for the (...) proof of a “Reasons Aggregation Theorem” – parallel to John Harsanyi’s 1955 “Social Aggregation Theorem”. All reasons for action are grounded in reason-providing values; and, for every such reason-providing value, there is in principle a way of measuring how strongly this value counts against each alternative. The theorem tells us that the appropriate measure of how much reason ATC there is against each alternative is simply a weighted sum of the strengths with which these values count against that alternative; the agent ought not ATC to perform an action iff there is ATC more reason against it than against some available alternative. (shrink)

"Dishonesty inspires more euphemisms than copulation or defecation. This helps desensitize us to its implications. In the post-truth era we don't just have truth and lies but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall just short of a lie. Enhanced truth it might be called. Neo-truth . Soft truth . Faux truth . Truth lite ." Deception has become the modern way of life. Where once the boundary line between truth and lies was (...) clear and distinct, it is no longer so. In the post-truth era, deceiving others has become a challenge, a game, a habit. High-profile dissemblers compete for news coverage, from journalists like Jayson Blair and professors like Joseph Ellis to politicians (of all stripes), executives, and "creative" accountants. Research suggests that the average American tells multiple lies on a daily basis, often for no good reason. Not a finger-wagging scolding, The Post-Truth Era is a combination of Ralph Keyes's investigative journalism and solid science. The result is a spirited exploration of why we lie about practically everything and the consequences such casual dishonesty has on society. American society has become permeated from top to bottom by deception. Its consequences for the nature of public discourse, media, business, literature, academia, and politics are profound. With dry humor, passionate fervor, and deep understanding, Ralph Keyes takes us on a tour of a world where truth and honesty are no longer absolutes but mutable, fluid concepts. (shrink)

These essays bring Weber's sociology to bear on the current transformation of the political landscape. After the collapse of communism, many states are faced with the challenges of democratization: they need to establish their legitimacy in an uncertain economic climate and within a new geopolitical order. The essays in this volume develop Weberian concepts and apply his comparative-historical method to deepen our understanding of these problems. They cover a wide range of examples, from the United Stated to Western and Eastern (...) Europe, and from Russia and Japan to the Islamic States. (shrink)

On the stupidity of oysters -- Divining creaturely love -- Horsing around: the marriage blanc of Nietzsche, Andreas-Salomø, and Røe -- Groping for an opening: Rilke between animal and angel -- Electric caresses:Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou -- Between perfection and temptation: Musil, Claudine, and Veronica -- The biological travesty -- "The creature whom we love": Proust and jealousy -- The love tone: capture and captivation -- "The soft word that comes deceiving": Fournival's bestiary of love -- The cuckold and the (...) cockatrice: Fourier and Hazlitt -- The animal bride and horny toads -- Unsettled being: Ovid's metamorphoses -- Fickle metaphysics -- Nymphomania and faunication -- Senseless arabesques: Wendy and Lucy -- The goat in the machine (a reprise) -- On cetaceous maidens -- Animal magnetism and alternative currents (or Tesla and the white dove). (shrink)

Tolstoy's remarkably economical novella The Kreutzer Sonata manages to create one of the most intense, vivid, and thought-provoking portraits of jealousy in the canon, and is as disturbing to read today as it no doubt was in 1889. The rather unhinged protagonist, Pozdnyshev, explains to his traveling companion and narrator: “Of all the passions, it is sexual, carnal love that is the strongest, the most malignant and the most unyielding” (48). This article identifies not only the “bestial” element of human (...) sexuality in Tolstoy's story but also the array of animals which the author offers to ventriloquize a certain complex (and times confused) polemic about gender relations. In other words, this analysis offers an interpretation of The Kreutzer Sonata as bestiary; one which offers a moral taxonomy of creaturely life and creaturely love. From the green-eyed monster of jealousy itself, through the Venus fly-trap and porcine couple, right up to the wild murderous beast, Pozdnyshev's confession is read via this zoological trope in order to emphasize, and question, that mobile border which separates the human from the inhuman, the civilized from the uncivilized. And it does so in order to highlight the incoherencies of the anthropocentric discursive regulation of this very same borderline. Animality and animosity are thus presented as the twin avatars of Tolstoy's intense and challenging vision. (shrink)

This essay offers an account of the truth conditions of sentences involving deontic modals like ‘ought’, designed to capture the difference between objective and subjective kinds of ‘ought’ This account resembles the classical semantics for deontic logic: according to this account, these truths conditions involve a function from the world of evaluation to a domain of worlds (equivalent to a so-called “modal base”), and an ordering of the worlds in such domains; this ordering of the worlds itself arises from two (...) further elements – a probability function and a value function – since this ordering ranks the worlds in accordance with the expected value of certain propositions that are true at those worlds. Thus, a proposition of the form ‘Ought (p)’ is true at a world of evaluation w if and only if p is true at all the top-ranked worlds in the domain assigned to w. This domain of worlds consists of metaphysically possible worlds, while the probability function is defined over a space of epistemically possible worlds (which may include metaphysically impossible worlds, such as worlds where Hesperus is not Phosphorus). Evidence is given that this account assigns the correct truth conditions to a wide range of sentences involving ‘ought’. Since these truth conditions involve both a domain of metaphysically possible worlds and a space of epistemically possible worlds, there are two corresponding kinds of conditional involving ‘ought’, depending on which space of worlds is restricted by the conditional. Finally, some objections that might be raised against this account are answered. (shrink)

Max Hallman has put forward an interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy according to which Nietzsche is a prototypical deep ecologist. In reply, I dispute Hallman’s main interpretive claim as well as its ethical and exegetical corollaries. I hold that Nietzsche is not a “biospheric egalitarian,” but rather an aristocratically individualistic “high humanist.” A consistently naturalistic transcendentalist, Nietzsche does submit a critique of modernity’s Christian-inflected anthropocentrism (pace Hallman), and yet—in his later work—he endorses exploitation in the quest for nobility (contra Hallman). I (...) conclude thatecophilosophers need to exercise hermeneutical caution in any attempt to appropriate Nietzsche for environmentally ethical designs, lest they illegitimately ventriloquize their own moral voices into an authoritative but alien mouthpiece. (shrink)

Dès la Bible, l’oeuvre d’art a souvent été dénoncée comme apparence trompeuse et incitation à l’adoration idolâtrique. S’affranchissant de ses fonctions essentiellement religieuses, elle est ensuite passée des églises aux musées, de l’adoration religieuse à l’admiration esthétique, d’une présence sacrée à l’expression du génie de l’artiste. Aujourd’hui, alors que certains dénoncent la quête de l’art pour l’art et que l’image règne sur les grands et les petits écrans, il demeure toujours aussi difficile d’apprécier l’image à sa juste valeur, de reconnaître (...) sa fonction médiatrice, entre idolâtrie et iconoclasme, entre aveuglement et lucidité désabusée. Ni vraie ni fausse, l’image est les deux à la fois: elle peut libérer comme elle peut asservir. (shrink)

Le présent article envisage une controverse philosophico-théologique interne à l’Église catholique qui, au milieu du XVIe siècle, précède et annonce les débats qui présideront à la préparation du décret sur les saintes images promulgué lors de la dernière (25e) session du concile de Trente. Il porte en particulier sur l’un des principaux points d’achoppement qui touche à l’interprétation d’une thèse de Thomas d’Aquin, laquelle est une reprise, mais adaptée à un autre contexte, d’un texte d’Aristote. Cette thèse porte sur le (...) type de vénération qui doit être rendu à l’image, et en particulier à celle du Christ. Il s’agit ici de montrer comment ce débat entremêle étroitement des enjeux philosophiques et théologiques qui touchent aussi bien à des questions de perception de l’image que de connaissance par l’image, tout en engageant un délicat questionnement sur les pratiques religieuses. (shrink)

Pursuing Justice, Second Edition, examines the issue of justice by considering the origins of the idea, formal systems of justice, current global issues of justice, and ways in which justice might be achieved by individuals, organizations, and the global community. Part 1 demonstrates how the idea of justice has emerged over time, starting with religion and philosophy, then moving to the justice as a concern of the state, and finally to the concept of social justice. Part 2 outlines the very (...) different mechanisms used by various nations for achieving state justice, including systems based on common law, civil law, and Islamic law, with a separate discussion of the US justice system. Part 3 focuses on four contemporary issues of justice: war, genocide, slavery, and the environment. Finally, Part 4 shows how individuals and organizations can go about pursuing justice, and describes the rise of global justice. This updated timely book helps students understand the complexities and nuances of a society's pursuit of justice. It provides students with the foundations of global justice systems, integrating Greek philosophies and major religious perspectives into a justice perspective, and contributes to undergraduate understanding of international justice bodies, NGOs, and institutions. New edition is completely updated and revised to achieve relevance for today's students Covers concepts of justice as well as ideas for pursuing and achieving justice Examines how our modern laws began, and traces their evolution to today's laws Presents concepts and issues in justice studies as well as a comparison of several systems of law Teaching resources include discussion questions and real-world examples. (shrink)