This chapter contains sections titled: Motivational Pluralism Compassion The First Metaphysics of Mitleid The Second Metaphysics of Mitleid Naturalizing Compassion The Solidarity With Sufferers and Different Worlds References.

Introduction Reza Davari Ardakni, the Iranian contemporary philosopher, distinguishes development from Western modernity; in that it considers modernity as natural and organic changes that Europe has gone through, but sees development as a planned design for implementing modernity in other countries. As a result, the closedness of development concerns only the developing countries, not Western modern ones. Davari emphasizes that the Western modernity has a universality that pertains to a unique reason and a unified world. The only way of thinking (...) in this world is a philosophical thought based on human self-centered reason, and given the pervasiveness of Western civilization. Therefore, Davari does not consider Westernization as mere imitation of Western customs and methods, but rather as a way of existence in the world. Westernization is a subjective view of the world and beings. Westernization is not optional, enabling non-Western people to avoid it. According to the Westernization scenario, the world today is entirely Westernized, and Davari considers Westernization as the inevitable fate of the people of this era, seeing two alternatives for them, both of which ultimately lead to the same destination, which is to embrace development; either they seize the power of science and technology and join the process of global modernization and participate in it, or they become subdued by this process and accept it without participation. Davari regards the first type of Westernization as active and the second type as passive. Problematique Therefore, underdevelopment is not a concept of the ancient world, nor even of a world between the ancient and the modern, or on the threshold of modernization. Underdevelopment is a condition of suspension and timelessness and being exposed to modernization. To escape the paradox of underdevelopment, which is the inevitable historical fate of non-modernized societies, Davari sees no way out other than embracing development. In other words, Westernized societies, which have become confused due to modernization, have no escape route other than turning to development. Therefore, some critics of Davari accuse the theory of Westernization of being a theoretical rupture. M. T. Tabatabaei, by rejecting the theoretical rupture in the theory of Westernization, believes that in the argument of Davari, we are only faced with a shift from a philosophical to an intellectual level. Tabatabaei, by avoiding providing a philosophical response to the critics of the theoretical rupture, believes that the introduction of active Westernization and collaboration in science and technology as a solution to escape from underdevelopment conditions, is only a shift from a philosophical level to an intellectual level and does not involve a rupture. Therefore, it seems that the philosophical issue of how or the possibility of escaping from underdevelopment conditions is still an open non answered problem. In this study, seeking a philosophical answer to this problem, an attempt has been made to summarize Davari's definitions of development, underdevelopment, participation in the world of science, and the role of humanities and social sciences in development, using his writings and speeches. It is proposed that a way to escape from the clesedness of development based on Davari's views, is to make use of analytical method with emphasizing on concepts and theories of the philosophy and metaphysics of science. Argument According to Davari, the social and human sciences that are responsible for development planning in underdeveloped societies must consider the characteristics of underdevelopment in order to facilitate the transition to more favorable conditions. Davari identifies the following conditions for successful development: 1) replacing tradition with science as the organizing and coordinating principle in society, 2) recognizing the universality of philosophy and science of the Western modernity and the impossibility of blindly imitation and adopting it, 3) inevitability of actively engaging and interacting with development, 4) recognizing the internal dynamics of scientific progress and avoiding authoritarian control, and 5) promoting free participation in the scientific paradigms. Therefore, Davari suggests the following steps towards development: 1) recognizing and understanding the problems of society and the local ecosystem, 2) understanding the philosophical and cultural foundations of Western civilization, 3) understanding the historical context and paradigms of science, 4) understanding the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of science, 5) recognizing the intellectual and philosophical capacities of our own community, and 6) reflecting our own philosophical and metaphysical assumptions in the scientific world in a way that is compatible with scientific methods. Given the motivations for change in science at both the global and national levels, including the emergence of heterodox or indigenous sciences, and the inevitable nature of development, Davari points to the possibility of a path between absolute rejecting or accepting the mainstream social and human sciences. However, this path is challenging and contingent upon the aforementioned conditions and steps of transition. Conclusion It is necessary to seek this path within the realm of the philosophy and metaphysics of science, particularly in the origins and foundations of the social and human sciences. Research in the metaphysics and philosophy of the social sciences provides the opportunity for active scientific engagement in the scientific paradigms and a reconsideration of the foundations of science, allowing for different philosophical foundations while are compatible with scientific methods. Successfully finding a path between absolute rejecting or accepting the existing social sciences will lead to an internal transformation within the field of science and, in fact, will advance the boundaries of knowledge. Therefore, it is possible, while adhering to the conditions of transition and actively participating in the world of science and technology, and accepting the unity of modernity and avoiding selectivity and imitation, to search for a way to overcome the closedness of development through a reconsideration of the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of science, while recognizing our own intellectual heritage and critically assessing Western science and technology. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study in Peirce's early metaphysics embedded in his writings between 1859 and 1867, which have received scant attention. Its purpose is to unravel his concept of reality and some relevant epistemological notions. Peirce's early metaphysical speculations can be divided into two parts. One is a system which covers thought between 1859 and 1862. The other manifests in lectures and writings between 1863 and 1867. The present study, consisting of five chapters, includes both of them. ;Murray (...) G. Murphey is one of the very few scholars who have attempted to take Peirce's early theories of knowledge and reality seriously. Thus the first chapter delineates his general interpretation of Peirce's first system, as a base for further discussions in the next two chapters. The second chapter clarifies Peirce's notion of metaphysics and then criticizes Murphey's understanding of Peirce's view of metaphysics. Similarly, the task of the third chapter is twofold: on the one hand, focusing on the epistemological and metaphysical issues, it provides an exposition of Peirce's system in detail and shows that some of his philosophical doctrines can be traced back to that system; on the other hand, it critically examines Murphey's interpretations of Peirce's texts and demonstrates that they involve misunderstandings or are one-sided. The fourth chapter scrutinizes Peirce's early writings on logic, which is regarded as a branch of semiotic and the foundation of metaphysics. It first elucidates Peirce's unpsychological view of logic as well as his notion of symbol and then discloses his theory of individual and diachronic view of knowledge therein embedded. Furthermore, Peirce's thesis that the function of a proposition is to reduce the impression to unity is investigated. Finally, it sums up the epistemological and metaphysical significance of Peirce's logical theory above expounded and, especially, specifies the fundamental tenets of Peirce's concept of reality implicitly involved in his early semeiotical approach to logic. The last chapter is simply a brief conclusion, roughly adumbrating Peirce's later doctrine of reality and how, in many aspects, it is foreshadowed by his early thought. (shrink)

In the face of forced migrants’ urgent needs and ongoing human rights violations endured within and across borders, scholars note the ‘dual imperative’ (Jacobsen and Landau 2003) of documenting these realities while also responding through humanitarian advocacy and/or political activism. This article documents one such experience, that is, an action research process that began with the first author’s accompaniment of Central American asylum-seeking mothers and children in Boston and included witnessing to and documenting these mothers’ narratives in a context (...) of systemic injustice, while contributing to the creation of a humanitarian grassroots network. The latter supported migrants’ needs while advocating for their right to asylum. Reflecting on these experiences, we explore how research that creates knowledge while acting in the world, demands what we herein describe as feminist activist scholarship grounded in dialogic relationality and compassionate care. The latter moves beyond empathetically feeling for or documenting the suffering of others, towards mutual accompaniment to engage in concrete actions to alleviate that suffering. The dialogic relationships of care in which scholars accompany and act with those at the margins have the potential to transform conventional, post-positivist knowledge production strategies from distancing or objectifying processes towards mutual accompaniment and activist scholarship. (shrink)

As interpersonal, racial, social, and international conflicts intensify in the world, it is important to safeguard the mental health of individuals affected by them. According to a Buddhist notion “if you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to be happy, practice compassion,” compassion practice is an intervention to cultivate conflict-proof well-being. Here, compassion practice refers to a form of concentrated meditation wherein a practitioner attunes to friend, enemy, and someone in between, thinking, (...) “I’m going to help them.” The compassion meditation is based on Buddhist philosophy that mental suffering is rooted in conceptual thoughts that give rise to generic mental images of self and others and subsequent biases to preserve one’s egoism, blocking the ultimate nature of mind. To contextualize compassion meditation scientifically, we adopted a Bayesian active inference framework to incorporate relevant Buddhist concepts, including mind, compassion, aggregates, suffering, reification, conceptual thoughts, and superimposition. In this framework, a person is considered a Bayesian Engine that actively constructs phenomena based on the aggregates of forms, sensations, discriminations, actions, and consciousness. When the person embodies rigid beliefs about self and others’ identities and the resulting ego-preserving bias, the person’s Bayesian Engine malfunctions, failing to use prediction errors to update prior beliefs. To counter this problem, after recognizing the causes of sufferings, a practitioner of the compassion meditation aims to attune to all others equally, friends and enemies alike, suspend identity-based conceptual thoughts, and eventually let go of any identity-grasping belief and ego-preserving bias that obscure reality. We present a brain model for the Bayesian Engine of three components: Relation-Modeling, Reality-Checking, and Conflict-Alarming, which are subserved by the Default-Mode Network, Frontoparietal Network and Ventral Attention Network, and Salience Network, respectively. Upon perceiving conflicts, the strengthening or weakening of ego-preserving bias will critically depend on whether the SN up-regulates the DMN or FPN/VAN, respectively. We propose that compassion meditation can strengthen brain regions that are conducive for suspending prior beliefs and enhancing the attunements to the counterparts in conflicts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Concepts, Judgments, and Unity in Kant's Metaphysical Deduction of the Relational Categories CHARLES NUSSBAUM 1. INTRODUCTION TO ANY ATTENTIVEREADERof the section of the Critique of Pure Reason' known as the "Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories" (A67/B92-A83/B to9), one paragraph in that section stands out particularly by virtue of its special importance for Kant's developing argument: The same function Which gives unity to the various representations in ajudgment also gives (...) unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concept of the understanding. The same understanding, through the same operations by which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form of a judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in general.... (CPR A79/B loS) The importance of this paragraph is, however, more than equaled by its difficulties, which center on the question of how the function which operates by means of analytical unity can be the same as one that operates by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in general. Put shortly, the problem is this. If the functions are really the same, then how do we distinguish at all between analytic and synthetic operations? But if they are different, then how can these forms of judgment serve as a clue for the discovery of the categories? ' Immanuel Kant, Critiqueof Pure Reason, trans. Norman KempSmith (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1963).Hereafter CPR. [89] 9~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 1990 The results of this dilemma which can be observed in the literature are not surprising: commentators tend to grasp one horn or the other. They either emphasize the difference between analysis and synthesis, and reject or dilute the claims as to sameness of function; or they take seriously Kant's argument concerning sameness of functions, and try to minimize the difference between analysis and synthesis. The major twentieth-century representant of the former approach is Kemp Smith," and of the latter, Paton. 3 This latter approach has found a formidable contemporary champion in the person of Henry Allison. By Allison's own admission,4 however, his position on this controversial topic was suggested (in part) by arguments first put forward over fifty years ago by Klaus Reich in a most remarkable book entitled Die Volls~ndigkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel, 5 a book, by the way, also greatly admired by Paton. 6 In the first section of this paper I will try to show that Reich's arguments are rather more subtle than Allison apparently takes them to be, and that Reich is one commentator who attempts to go between the horns of the dilemma described above, and who essays an interpretation of our crucial paragraph that unifies its seemingly divergent tendencies. In the second section of the paper I will introduce some interpretive elements of my own. 2. Let us begin by reacquainting ourselves with Kant's notion of analytical unity, one aspect of this debate which is not particularly controversial and is largely agreed upon by all parties. For Kant, analytical unity is the sort of unity achieved by all general concepts (conceptus communes) insofar as they abstract from all differences that subsist between the objects under them, or the lower concepts subordinated to them. 7 A general concept unifies these objects or concepts by means of a common mark or set of marks. Thus Kant's example at CPR A69/B94 of the unification of bodies under the concepts 'body' and 'divisible' is a perfectly representative instance of unification via analytical unity, as the function upon which such concepts "rest." Let us note that the " Norman KempSmith,A CommentarytoKant's "Cr/t~rueofPureReason"(NewYork:HumanitiesPress, 196~). 3 H.J. Paton, Kant's MetaphysicofExperience, 2 vols.(London:George Allenand Unwin,Ltd., 1936). 4 Henry Allison,Kant's TranscendentalIdealum (NewHaven:YaleUniversityPress, 1983), 144 n. 3o. Hereafter KTI. 5 KlausReich,Die Vollst~ndigkeitderKantischenUrteilstafel,3rd. ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986). Hereafter VKU. 6 Paton, Kant's Metaphysic, 1:302. Kant, we should note, does not makethis important logicaldistinctionbetweensubordination... (shrink)

We present some teaching materials for metaphysics which use the method of introducing issues via puzzles, paradoxes, problems, and conundrums in metaphysics. The method is motivated by the aim to increase student participation and engagement in metaphysical issues so that the student considers and understands philosophical theories based on specific metaphysical concepts. These materials are a result of distilling first and second year undergraduate academic materials into simple presentations that retain the core focus on salient concepts. The (...) presented teaching methods share the same approach as Raymond Smullyan's puzzle-first approach to teaching. Potential goals for the material are numerous; one main goal is the development of the individual student's independent, original, and creative philosophical thinking and analysis as applied to the area of metaphysics. Other goals include the appreciation of overlap between different subareas within metaphysics - overlaps that we note. The article finishes with a further consideration of the importance and utilization of the emotions elicited from materials of philosophical problems and how these can be best incorporated into the teaching methods. (shrink)

Introduction: Expressions of dignity as a clinical phenomenon in nursing homes as expressed by caregivers were investigated. A coherence could be detected between the concepts and phenomena of existence and dignity in relationships and caring culture as a context. A caring culture is interpreted by caregivers as the meaning-making of what is accepted or not in the ward culture. Background: The rationale for the connection between existence and dignity in relationships and caring culture is that suffering is a part of (...) existence, as well as compassion in relieving suffering, and ontological interdependency. Aim: To describe different expressions of dignity in relationships and existence in context of caring cultures from the perspective of the caregivers. Research design: The methodology and method are hermeneutic. The method used was to merge the theoretical preunderstanding as one horizon of understanding with empirical data. Participants and research context: Focus group interviews with caregivers in nursing homes. Ethical considerations: The principles of the Helsinki Declaration have been followed to, for example, preserve self-determination, integrity, dignity, confidentiality and privacy of the research persons. Findings: Data interpretation resulted in four themes: Encountering existential needs that promote dignity in a caring culture; To amplify dignity in relationships by the creative art of caring in a caring culture; Violation of dignity by ignorance or neglect in a non-caring culture and The ethic of words and appropriated ground values in a caring culture. Discussion: Dignity-promoting acts of caring, or dignity-depriving acts of non-caring are adequate to see from the perspective of dignity in relationships and existence and the caring culture. Conclusions: Dignity in relationships seems to touch the innermost existential life, as the existential life is dependent on confirmation from others. (shrink)

Modern Studies in Philosophy, we are informed on the page facing the title-page, "is a series of anthologies presenting contemporary interpretations and evaluations of the works of major philosophers." The volumes are "intended to be contributions to contemporary debates as well as to the history of philosophy; they not only trace the origins of many problems important to modern philosophy, but also introduce major philosophers as interlocutors in current discussions." In the first of the two volumes on Plato three (...) of the articles chosen by Gregory Vlastos have not appeared elsewhere: Julius Moravcsik, Learning as Recollection; G. E. L. Owen, Plato on Not-Being; David Higgins, Sentence Meaning, Negation, and Plato's Problem of Non-Being. The other studies in Volume One are reprints: R. Robinson and J. D. Denniston, Plato; H. F. Cherniss, The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas; A. Wedberg, The Theory of Ideas; R. C. Cross and A. D. Woozley, Knowledge, Belief and the Forms; R. Robinson, Hypothesis in the Republic; G. Vlastos, Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo; R. E. Allen, Participation and Predication in Plato's Middle Dialogues; Colin Strang, Plato and the Third Man; J. L. Ackrill, Symplokë eidön; J. L. Ackrill, Plato and the Copula: Sophist 251-259. In Volume Two Terry Penner, "Thought and Desire in Plato" has not been published before. The others have: Paul Shorey, Plato's Ethics; David Sachs, A Fallacy in Plato's Republic; Raphael Demos, A Fallacy in Plato's Republic?; J. D. Mabbott, Is Plato's Republic Utilitarian?; G. Vlastos, Justice and Happiness in the Republic; F. M. Cornford, The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Symposium; R. A. Markus, The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Symposium; Glenn R. Morrow, Plato and the Rule of Law; Wayne A. R. Leys, Was Plato Non-Political?; F. E. Sparshott, Plato as Anti-Political Thinker; Renford Bambrough, Plato's Political Analogies; E. R. Dodds, Plato and the Irrational Soul; W. K. C. Guthrie, Plato's Views on the Nature of the Soul; Harold Cherniss, The Sources of Evil According to Plato; W. J. Verdenius, Plato's Doctrines of Artistic Imitation. Obviously, the above listed articles will be welcome to those debating issues in Plato and to historians of twentieth-century philosophy. There are two difficulties, however. The print is too small in the body of the text and is nearly microscopic in the footnotes and diagrams. Reading thus becomes almost painful. Margins to the left, right, top and bottom of the pages are practically nonexistent. On occasion footnote material is misplaced--for example, the comment on Strang's article as originally published elsewhere should be on p. 184, not on p. 187, of Volume One. But a greater problem is the fact that almost all the articles on metaphysics and epistemology are by linguistic analysts. Vlastos in his introductory remarks admits as much: "Volume One is heavily weighted on the 'analytical' side." He reports the statement of an un-named advocate of conceptual analysis "that these [analytic] methods now enable us to understand Plato better than he was ever understood by anyone in history--better than by any of his own contemporaries, even better than by himself!" He disclaims such euphoria but insists "there is an element of truth in it after all" insofar as analytic tools can alert a student to ambiguity and its consequences in some of Plato's sentences. Hence, "if we come across such sentences in Plato, it would be plainly true to say that we can understand them better than he did and even to add that we can, therefore, understand him better, since we can see both what he meant to say and the logical liabilities of his incautious sentences." All this is true enough, but a warning still is in order. Linguistic analysts tend to read only some of Plato's dialogues and, even within them, to concentrate on some passages only. This is understandable in view of their interests and the capacity of the analytic technique. But that selectivity might lead them to believe that the Plato thus revealed is the complete and authentic Plato, which it is not. Hence, in reading and teaching Plato one must complement language- and concept-analysis with other approaches. Vlastos himself is aware of this necessity : [[sic]] "Once we have made full allowance for what modern semantics and logic can do to make Plato more intelligible and alive for us today, we should be quick to concede that borrowings from this quarter must be used with economy and discretion, and that continuing reliance on older linguistic and historical disciplines is as essential now as it has ever been in the past if the object of our inquiries is Plato himself, instead of some mock-up more pleasing to current taste." One could only wish that Vlastos had fostered that reliance on other disciplines by including articles of that sort among those he actually chose.--L. S. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to design a conception of political poverty that can address the loss of the experience of political freedom. This form of political poverty is described as separate from poverty of resources and opportunities, and poverty of capabilities required for participation. The study aims to make intelligible how a person or a group can suffer from a diminishing and fracturing of social experience, which can lead to the inability to experience oneself as a capable (...) and credible political agent, political engagement as a meaningful field of action, and democratic politics as a meaningful avenue for changing things for the better. This is a phenomenon which has been heretofore neglected by political theorists. -/- The study presents a heuristic diagnosis of political poverty as loss of experiential freedom that involves four aspects of experience that have specifically political relevance: loss of trust, loss of expressivity, loss of a sense of access to the public world, and the loss of future temporality in experience. Diminishing and fracturing of these aspects of social experience can lead to politically impoverished persons and groups to become complicit in their own marginalisation by remaining unmotivated to challenge it. These aspects of social experience are approached through phenomenological portraits, chosen from literature on social exclusion and poverty. The diagnosis remains open to further development through exploration of other aspects of experience. -/- The study draws on the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt to present an account of political freedom as only experienced in co-existence with others. Through a critical discussion of their work, a more comprehensive account of political agency is developed. The experience of having political agency involves not just the cognitive and communicative capacities of the subject, but also the entire perceptual and motor intentionality of their lived body. The experience of meaningfulness is approached by exploring the intersubjective constitution of the self in a dialectical process with their social environment. This experience is described as a form of faith in oneself as an agent and in the meaningfulness of political engagement. Such faith is a practical, meaning-giving intentional relationship of a lived body to their social environment. -/- This study emphasizes the experience of being a capable and credible political agent, and experiencing politics as a meaningful field for engagement, as important aspects of political freedom that should be considered alongside inclusivity of democratic processes, the equality of opportunity to participate, and the equality of the cognitive and communicative capabilities required for effective participation. In order to discuss political poverty as the loss of experiential freedom, we must go beyond objectivist models of social critique and approach the problem with the tools of existential phenomenology. (shrink)

Modern Studies in Philosophy, we are informed on the page facing the title-page, "is a series of anthologies presenting contemporary interpretations and evaluations of the works of major philosophers." The volumes are "intended to be contributions to contemporary debates as well as to the history of philosophy; they not only trace the origins of many problems important to modern philosophy, but also introduce major philosophers as interlocutors in current discussions." In the first of the two volumes on Plato three (...) of the articles chosen by Gregory Vlastos have not appeared elsewhere: Julius Moravcsik, Learning as Recollection; G. E. L. Owen, Plato on Not-Being; David Higgins, Sentence Meaning, Negation, and Plato's Problem of Non-Being. The other studies in Volume One are reprints: R. Robinson and J. D. Denniston, Plato; H. F. Cherniss, The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas; A. Wedberg, The Theory of Ideas; R. C. Cross and A. D. Woozley, Knowledge, Belief and the Forms; R. Robinson, Hypothesis in the Republic; G. Vlastos, Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo; R. E. Allen, Participation and Predication in Plato's Middle Dialogues; Colin Strang, Plato and the Third Man; J. L. Ackrill, Symplokë eidön; J. L. Ackrill, Plato and the Copula: Sophist 251-259. In Volume Two Terry Penner, "Thought and Desire in Plato" has not been published before. The others have: Paul Shorey, Plato's Ethics; David Sachs, A Fallacy in Plato's Republic; Raphael Demos, A Fallacy in Plato's Republic?; J. D. Mabbott, Is Plato's Republic Utilitarian?; G. Vlastos, Justice and Happiness in the Republic; F. M. Cornford, The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Symposium; R. A. Markus, The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Symposium; Glenn R. Morrow, Plato and the Rule of Law; Wayne A. R. Leys, Was Plato Non-Political?; F. E. Sparshott, Plato as Anti-Political Thinker; Renford Bambrough, Plato's Political Analogies; E. R. Dodds, Plato and the Irrational Soul; W. K. C. Guthrie, Plato's Views on the Nature of the Soul; Harold Cherniss, The Sources of Evil According to Plato; W. J. Verdenius, Plato's Doctrines of Artistic Imitation. Obviously, the above listed articles will be welcome to those debating issues in Plato and to historians of twentieth-century philosophy. There are two difficulties, however. The print is too small in the body of the text and is nearly microscopic in the footnotes and diagrams. Reading thus becomes almost painful. Margins to the left, right, top and bottom of the pages are practically nonexistent. On occasion footnote material is misplaced--for example, the comment on Strang's article as originally published elsewhere should be on p. 184, not on p. 187, of Volume One. But a greater problem is the fact that almost all the articles on metaphysics and epistemology are by linguistic analysts. Vlastos in his introductory remarks admits as much: "Volume One is heavily weighted on the 'analytical' side." He reports the statement of an un-named advocate of conceptual analysis "that these [analytic] methods now enable us to understand Plato better than he was ever understood by anyone in history--better than by any of his own contemporaries, even better than by himself!" He disclaims such euphoria but insists "there is an element of truth in it after all" insofar as analytic tools can alert a student to ambiguity and its consequences in some of Plato's sentences. Hence, "if we come across such sentences in Plato, it would be plainly true to say that we can understand them better than he did and even to add that we can, therefore, understand him better, since we can see both what he meant to say and the logical liabilities of his incautious sentences." All this is true enough, but a warning still is in order. Linguistic analysts tend to read only some of Plato's dialogues and, even within them, to concentrate on some passages only. This is understandable in view of their interests and the capacity of the analytic technique. But that selectivity might lead them to believe that the Plato thus revealed is the complete and authentic Plato, which it is not. Hence, in reading and teaching Plato one must complement language- and concept-analysis with other approaches. Vlastos himself is aware of this necessity : [[sic]] "Once we have made full allowance for what modern semantics and logic can do to make Plato more intelligible and alive for us today, we should be quick to concede that borrowings from this quarter must be used with economy and discretion, and that continuing reliance on older linguistic and historical disciplines is as essential now as it has ever been in the past if the object of our inquiries is Plato himself, instead of some mock-up more pleasing to current taste." One could only wish that Vlastos had fostered that reliance on other disciplines by including articles of that sort among those he actually chose.--L. S. (shrink)

Meinertsen’s unifier is discussed on the background of Aristotle’s distinction between four kinds of unity. It argued that Meinertsen combines two different kinds of unity that exclude each other. Only Aristotle’s first meaning of unity seems to be relevant for Meinertsen’s unifier. But this meaning applies literally only to spatial complexes. Its application to states of affairs is problematic because they are mostly not spatial. It is also problematic because unity in the first sense requires an agent. Meinertsen’s (...) unifiers are connectors between particulars and universals in states of affairs. It is objected that connectors in a state of affairs lead to a vicious infinite regress of further states of affairs. Meinertsen argues for his unifiers that states of affairs without them are non-mereological, that is, their existence is not entailed by the existence of their constituents. That does not seem a good argument if it is realised that a complex is not an additional entity and thus not existent if the existence of its parts is sufficient for its existence. It is also pointed out that the meaning of “mereological” involved is not related to the classical mereological calculus. (shrink)

David Lewis presented Convention as an alternative to the conventionalism characteristic of early-twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Rudolf Carnap is well known for suggesting the arbitrariness of any particular linguistic convention for engaging in scientific inquiry. Analytic truths are self-consistent, and are not checked against empirical facts to ascertain their veracity. In keeping with the logical positivists before him, Lewis concludes that linguistic communication is conventional. However, despite his firm allegiance to conventions underlying not just languages but also social customs, he pioneered (...) the view that convening need not require any active agreement to participate. Lewis proposed that conventions arise from “an exchange of manifestations of a propensity to conform to a regularity” (87–8). In reasserting the conventional quality of languages and other practices resting on mutual expectations, Lewis comfortably works within the analytic tradition. Yet he also deviates from his predecessors because his conventionalist approach is comprehensively grounded in instrumentalism. Lewis adopts an extension of David Hume's desire-belief psychology articulated in rational choice theory. He develops his philosophy of convention relying on the highly formal mid-twentieth-century expected utility and game theories. This attempt to account for language and social customs wholly in terms of instrumental rationality has the implication of reducing normativity to preference satisfaction. Lewis’ approach continues in the trend of undermining normative political philosophy because institutions and practices arise spontaneously, without the deliberate involvement of agents. Perhaps Lewis’ Convention is best seen as a resurgent form of analytic philosophy, characterized by “a style of argument, hostility to [ambitious] metaphysics, focus on language, and the dominance of logic and formalization” that solves the dilemma of “combining the analytic inheritance…with normative concerns” by reducing normativity to individuals’ preference fulfillment consistent with the axioms of rational choice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law by Stephen L. BrockBrian BesongThe Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law by Stephen L. Brock (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020), xv + 277 pp.Fr. Stephen L. Brock is arguably one of the most important contemporary contributors to the Thomistic understanding of natural law. Hence, the publication of his (...) updated and revised doctoral dissertation on the topic [End Page 289] of the metaphysics of natural law in St. Thomas will be gladly received by Thomistic scholars and moral theorists alike. In The Light That Binds, Brock's central task is to explain the metaphysics of the promulgation of natural law in man. Put differently although extant literature on natural law may be useful for action analysis—why lying is always wrong, say—less attention has been paid to the way in which natural law has been promulgated by God and is present in the human intellect. What literature is available, either as an explanation of St. Thomas or as criticism of the same, has failed to do Aquinas justice, so Brock argues.The book comprises seven chapters and an introduction. In the first chapter, Brock's central goal is to survey the ways in which (especially more recent) commentators of Aquinas have distorted the sense in which natural law constitutes genuine law, as well as the relationship between natural law and God. For, there is a line of thought on natural law, particularly prominent in the "new natural law" tradition, according to which the principles at the heart of the theory do not fully satisfy the four criteria of legitimate law given by Aquinas. Rival views have natural law constituting a real law, but in virtue of an epistemically explicit reliance on God as lawgiver, among other distortions. Figureheads surveyed in the chapter include Dom Odon Lottin, Ernest Fortin, and Francisco Suárez, among others.In the second chapter, Brock outlines and defends his positive view regarding the legal status of the natural law by way of continued discussion of Lottin, particularly Lottin's contention that St. Thomas was heavily influenced by a mid-thirteenth-century Franciscan tract, De legibus et praeceptis. Brock argues that St. Thomas conceives of natural law as having an even closer relationship to eternal law than is posited by the earlier Franciscan tract, and the rest of the chapter is largely focused on unpacking this close relationship. In sum, natural law is law because it involves a rational ordering by God of our intellect to the goods of our nature, a human participation in an eternal ordering of all things to their ends (i.e., the eternal law). We need not discover the source of the ordering—namely, God—in grasping the first principles of his ordering, as Brock explains here and elsewhere. But the strictly legal status of the principles requires that natural law comes from a legitimate authority, among other essential elements.Chapters 3 and 4 tackle the more human side of the metaphysics of natural law. More concretely, in these chapters, Brock explains the wheres and the whats of our possession of the natural law. For, not all ordering of objects to ends implies the sort of normativity we see in the natural law. Brute animals, among others, have natural inclinations too, and yet they are not governed through these instinctual drives by a natural law. Natural law [End Page 290] is present preeminently in the human intellect, Brock argues, and is not to be confused with the prerational drives that we share as part of our animal nature. God instills these rational drives—the light, as it were—into reason in such a way that an individual can grasp its force autonomously, as basic conceptional truths about what right and wrong consist in (72). Here it would have been nice for Brock to reflect briefly on how Aquinas's views on moral knowledge fit within his broader epistemological commitments, as the natural (conceptual) knowledge of right and wrong at first glance shares common ground with the Franciscan tradition on divine illumination as found in figures... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 (2006) 635-663 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]The Value of Humanity and Kant's Conception of EvilMatthew CaswellRecent years have seen the development of a powerful reinterpretation of Kant's basic approach in ethical thought. Kant, it is argued, should not be read as defending the stark, metaphysics-laden formalism for which his theory is so famous. Rather, the reinterpreters claim that the heart (...) of Kantian practical philosophy is the absolute value of humanity, or human rational nature. 1 Kant's ethics can thus be understood as a "theory of value," 2 in which the singular value of our own end-setting capacity as rational agents is taken as supreme, or even as the source of all value. On this reading, morality is just acting in such a way that respects or promotes the value of humanity. Moreover, this value may be deduced through an immanent, regressive argument about the conditions of practical agency as such, according to which any adequate conception of ourselves as agents commits us, finally, to moral norms.The consequences of this approach to Kantian ethics for such central issues as the doctrine of transcendental freedom, ethical formalism, the meaning of Kantian deontology, and indeed the very picture of human moral life for which Kant's theory is meant to account are profound. The evaluation of the value of humanity interpretation ultimately must examine the challenge posed to the traditional readings of these doctrines in a comprehensive manner. A contribution to this evaluation, however, can be made by a consideration of the relation of the conception [End Page 635] of the value of humanity to a far-reaching but relatively neglected element of Kant's theory, namely, his theory of evil as strictly ethically accountable. In the following analysis, I will show that the assignment of absolute value to humanity is incompatible with Kant's conception of evil. Accordingly, it will be shown that humanity, at least in so far as it is understood in the influential writings of several recent interpreters, cannot be taken by Kant as absolutely morally valuable. 3In the first part of this paper, we shall see how Kant's theory of the "original predisposition" (Anlage), presented as part of Kant's investigation of evil in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, denies the central claim of the value of humanity interpretation (Rel, 6:26–28). 4 Next I show why the position defended in the theory of the original Anlage is required by Kant's commitment to the imputability of evil. I will then consider whether the position of the Religion is compatible with the Groundwork argument so favored by the reinterpreters, in which Kant claims that the categorical imperative commands us to treat humanity in ourselves and in others as an end in itself. In the second part of the paper, several leading proponents of the value of humanity interpretation will be examined and criticized in the light of Kant's views uncovered in the first part. I close with brief remarks on the importance of the conception of evil for Kantian theory.1. Kant's Conception of Evil and the Normative Independence of Humanity and personalityBook One of the Religion contains Kant's definitive treatment of the issue of evil. In his investigation, Kant is committed to the basic imputability of evil to an extent rarely matched in the history of philosophy. For Kant, everything for which we can be praised or blamed—everything for which we are morally accountable, and thus everything that is morally good or evil—must necessarily be the product [End Page 636] of a free will. 5 This means that certain desires, or even our sensuous nature in general, cannot be the source of evil, for our sensuousness is not a product of our own freedom, but an imposition of unfree nature. If our will were overpowered by sensuous influences, such that we were compelled by natural forces to deviate from the law, we could... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Understanding and Experience of Compassion:Aquinas and the Dalai LamaJudith BaradHis Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama writes that the essence of Mahayana Buddhism is compassion.1 Although most people recognize compassion as one of the most admirable virtues, it is not easy to find discussions of it by Christian theologians. Instead, Christian theologians tend to discuss charity, a virtue infused by God into a person. Some of (...) these theologians, such as Cardinal Henri de Lubac,2 insist that Christian charity and Buddhist compassion are very different from each other. Are they correct? A good source to investigate this claim is in Aquinas's Summa Theologica, which contains a very developed discussion of charity. If we look at Aquinas's text and compare it to what the current Dalai Lama writes about compassion, we will recognize that they are discussing the same virtue. Moreover, by combining the insights from East and West, as expressed by the thoughts of the current Dalai Lama and St. Thomas Aquinas, we can achieve a better grasp of compassion so that we can more easily practice it in our daily lives. Though remarkably similar, the two accounts offer differing perspectives, which can be incorporated for mutual enrichment.Much of Aquinas's philosophy of compassion derives from his Christian beliefs, just as much of the Dalai Lama's teachings on compassion are based on Tibetan Buddhism. This explains some of the differences in their accounts. Unlike Christians, Buddhists neither believe in a personal God nor in a soul. Yet despite their theological differences, Aquinas and the Dalai Lama generally share a very similar view of compassion. In fact, one could well imagine Aquinas agreeing with the Dalai Lama who, after acknowledging his religious influence, writes that his goal is "to appeal for an approach to ethics based on universal rather than religious principles."3 It is appropriate, therefore, to begin by considering the similarities in their accounts of compassion, starting with their definitions of compassion. [End Page 11]DefinitionsEtymologically, the word "compassion"—compassio—comes from two Latin words: com means "with" and pati means "suffer." Literally, then, "compassion" means "to suffer with." Aquinas discusses compassion as an interior effect of charity, a theological virtue. It is interior because compassion is felt within the person who has charity. The cause of compassion, charity, Aquinas describes as the friendship between God's children and God Himself. Although Aquinas wrote prolifically on the subject of charity, someone could overlook his writing on compassion because he discusses it under the term "mercy." Diana Fritz Cates, for instance, who draws on an Aristotelian-Thomistic ethical framework to develop a theory of compassion, observes, "Aristotle and Thomas have little to say about compassion: hence, it will not be helpful to begin with their accounts."4 However, Aquinas uses the word misericordia (mercy) as a synonym of compassio (compassion). The synonymous relationship between compassion and mercy is also recognized by the Dalai Lama, who affirms, "Mercy and compassion are the same."5Aquinas defines mercy as "heartfelt sympathy for another's distress, impelling us to succor him if we can." If we experience this heartfelt sympathy, we're not discouraged if the person we try to help doesn't respond. Explicitly connecting mercy and compassion, Aquinas add that mercy, misericordia, gets its name "from denoting a person's compassionate heart (miserum cor) for another's unhappiness."6 The concept of "another's unhappiness" is important to his discussion. A necessary condition of being happy, in Aquinas's view, is that an individual must obtain what he or she wishes. Conversely, someone is unhappy when he suffers what he doesn't wish to suffer. Aquinas maintains that the suffering produced by one's frustrated desire for what he or she perceives as good is a sufficient condition for evoking mercy. In regard to the merciful response, it shouldn't matter what the suffering person perceives as good. So long as the person is suffering what he doesn't wish to suffer, this person should be treated mercifully. Suppose a teenager suffers from being unpopular with his peers. Although the compassionate person may not value popularity, she should extend compassion to the... (shrink)

Background Nurses experienced intense ethical and moral challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our 2020 qualitative parent study of frontline nurses’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic identified ethics as a cross-cutting theme with six subthemes: moral dilemmas, moral uncertainty, moral distress, moral injury, moral outrage, and moral courage. We re-analyzed ethics-related findings in light of refined definitions of ethics concepts. Research aim To analyze frontline U.S. nurses’ experiences of ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research design Qualitative analysis using a directed content (...) methodology. Participants and research context The study included 43 nurses from three major metropolitan academic medical centers and one community hospital in the northeastern, mid-Atlantic, midwestern, and western United States. Ethical considerations Participant privacy and data confidentiality were addressed. Findings Moral dilemmas arose from many situations, most frequently related to balancing safety and patient care. Moral uncertainty commonly arose from lacking health information or evidence about options. Moral distress occurred when nurses knew the right thing to do, but were prevented from doing so, including with end-of-life issues. Moral injury (accompanied by suffering, shame, or guilt) occurred after doing, seeing, or experiencing wrongdoing, often involving authority figures. Nurses expressed moral outrage at events and people within and outside healthcare. Despite difficult ethical situations, some nurses exemplified moral courage, sometimes by resisting policies they perceived as preventing compassionate care, guided by thinking about what was best for patients. Discussion This content analysis of ethics-related subthemes revealed conceptual characteristics and clarified distinctions with corresponding exemplars. Conceptual clarity may inform responses and interventions to address ethical quandaries in nursing practice. Conclusions Ethics education in nursing must address the moral dilemmas of pandemics, disasters, and other crises. Nurses need time and resources to heal from trying to provide the best care when no ideal option was available. (shrink)

Carnap famously argued that metaphysics unavoidably involves a confusion between science and poetry. Unlike the lyric poet, who does not attempt to make an argument, the metaphysician attempts to make an argument while simultaneously lacking in musical talent. Carnap’s objection that metaphysics unavoidably involves a blend of philosophy and poetry is not a 20th century insight. Plato, in his beautifully crafted Phaedo, presents us with the imprisoned Socrates, who having been condemned to death for practicing philosophy in the (...) Apology, has a dream in which he realizes that he ought to make music. In this dialogue, however, Plato indicates no hint of the scorn that Carnap has for metaphysics—rather Socrates’ friends find him setting Aesop’s fables to verse. In the modern era, Nietzsche re-introduced the ‘music making Socrates’ in his Birth of Tragedy. But Nietzsche is not the first to revive the concept in modern philosophy. Before Nietzsche’s call for a new music-making Socrates, the early German Romantics, in particular Schlegel, explicitly called for the identification of poetry and science in the concept of Poesie. As Schlegel writes: ‘Alle Kunst soll Wissenschaft werden, und alle Wissenschaft Kunst werden; Poesie und Philosophie sollen vereinigt sein.’ On the one hand, in Ion Socrates is not wrong to critique Ion for not knowing the significance of his own work. On the other hand, Socrates himself recognizes in Phaedo that he is guilty of failing to heed the call to make music. Long misunderstood, the Romantic concept of Poesie is not mere irrationalism, for it offers an aesthetic metaphysics of the Absolute. Romanticism is indeed a philosophy of the Absolute, but one which cannot conceive of any solution to the profound impasses that confront philosophical knowing except by learning to make music. (shrink)

Kant, probably more than any other philosopher, has suffered in the hands of his commentators and critics, both friendly and hostile. The regrettable tendency to truncate philosophical doctrines, to treat them as heaps of bones from which the interpreter can select or pick one or two with the view of using them in his game of intellectual skill, finds its most patent expression in the various treatments of Kant’s account of knowledge, faith and action. It is somehow inviting to look (...) upon the writer of the three Critiques as a tri-cephalous creature—each head pointing in a different direction, a self-contained centre of ideas, each to be examined differently and separately. And yet Kant, with all his failings, cannot be regarded a philosophical schizophrenic. On the contrary, by emphasizing the unitary nature of the human being in all its varied aspects—epistemic, moral and aesthetic—his philosophy is a singularly convincing plea for the rejection of an atomistic approach to human personality. As it is, there are those amongst Kant’s readers who never go beyond the Critique of Pure Reason—indeed quite a number of them, deliberately or unwittingly, get bogged down on the Preface and the Introduction—and who claim that they know their Kant inside-out. There are, again, those who rest content with reading the Critique of Practical Reason and who labour under the impression that they have penetrated to the heart of Kant’s philosophy. Both these limited attitudes are gravid with distortions and they must obviously lead to wrong conclusions. One does not need to be a Kantian scholar or even an unsuspecting convert to see at a glance that at least the first two Critiques are complementary, that only when they are pieced together can Kant’s conception of man be fully comprehended. His view is as simple as it is clear: man participates in two worlds—that of physical nature and that of morality. He is an event, an object among others, determined by certain a priori necessary conditions which, when applied to the sensory manifold, yield subjects and objects, knowledge and nature; but he is also an agent and as such he creates another dimension which, though ‘located’ in the phenomenal world, is not reducible to it. (shrink)

This new addition to the series New Studies in Practical Philosophy edited by W. D. Hudson is a study of deontic moral judgment, in particular of moral concepts which embody standards for the assessment of claims to right or wrong actions. Three main theses are quite clearly stated. The first thesis concerns the distinctive character of the moral point of view which is irreducible to either logical or factual considerations. The second thesis is that moral judgments claim interpersonal validity (...) in the sense that the speaker makes the implicit claim that every reflective agent who considers the judgment "ought to agree" with the judgment as a correct one. The third thesis pertains to the moral disagreement. It is maintained that moral disagreements are "in principle" decidable, not by way of deductive subsumption under the criteria governing the uses of moral concepts, but by a method of inquiry analogous to that of scientific inquiry involving the use of hypothesis. The author acknowledges his debt to Arthur Prior, J. Kovesi, and M. Polanyi. The book is good in raising questions on the relation between moral inquiry and scientific inquiry, the significance of the open texture of moral terms and its relation to ethical argumentation, and the problem of reconciling differences of moral beliefs in the setting of their connection with nonmoral beliefs.—A. S. C. (shrink)

"Seymon Lyudvigovich Frank, the author of the volume here made available for the first time in English translation, was one of the leading Russian philosophers of this century; some authorities consider him the most outstanding Russian philosopher of any age...._ " _Man's Soul__ is a book which perfectly exemplifies the generous conception of the mission and competence of philosophy characteristic of Frank and the other members of the Russian metaphysical movement. Frank's stated aim in the treatise is to (...) reclaim for philosophy a field of investigation which, from the time of Plato and Aristotle to that of the Russian Idealists, philosophers had viewed as properly theirs, but which, since the mid-nineteenth century, they had allowed to fall into almost complete neglect: the study of the nature of the human soul...._ "The moral message of _Man's Soul__ is well summed up by its epigraph, quoted from St. Augustine: 'Let man first of all return to his own self, so that once he has, as it were, stepped therein, he may rise from thence and be elevated to God.'" -- from the foreword by Philip J. Swoboda. (shrink)

An account and development of Arthur Murphy's Theory of Practical Reason and its application to contemporary moral problems. Chapter II gives a schematic account of Murphy's theory of normative discourse. Chapter III contrasts this theory with other theories and approaches. The author justly remarks that "Murphy's intent has been primarily to restore proper balance among considerations that play a role in practical discourse and to steer clear of the pitfalls which would impair or diminish the effectiveness of reason in human (...) actions." Chapter IV deals with "the contemporary erosion of practical reason and critique of existentialistic [[sic]] ethics." Chapter V contains an interesting discussion of Murphy's conception of developing and dynamic self as responsible agent. It gives recognition to the moral self as basic condition that underlies the activity of practical justification. The final chapter undertakes practical applications of the theory expounded. The monograph is a good exposition and defense of Murphy's important contribution to contemporary moral philosophy.--A. S. C. (shrink)

Gottfried Martin has recently reminded us of a useful distinction between two possible ways of doing metaphysics. We may proceed by framing a “theory of principles” or by proposing a “theory of being”. Aristotle explicitly formulates both possibilities as the task of metaphysics, formulating a theory of principles in his doctrine of the four types of causal explanation in the first book of the Metaphysics, while exploring the theory of being in a number of other passages, (...) such as Book I, chapters 6 and 9; Book X, chapter 2; and Book XIII. These passages do not elaborate principles whereby we can analyze the structure of certain entities, be they causes, substances or forms, but rather concern themselves with the ontological status of these entities—in what sense can they be said to be? In Plato this distinction is more implicit, but we may contrast the theory of forms developed in the Phaedo and the Republic with the subsequent probing investigation of the being of these forms in the Parmenides and the Sophist. Kant “explicitly claims to have discovered and presented a complete and necessary system of the basic concepts and principles. The proof of the completeness and necessity of this system is the aim of the middle part of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Analytic.” Yet. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art's DetourA Clash of Aesthetic TheoriesS. K. Wertz (bio)Both John Dewey1 and Martin Heidegger2 thought that art's audience had to take a detour in order to appreciate or understand a work of art. They wrote about this around the same time (mid-1930s) and independently of one another, so this similar circumstance in the history of aesthetics is unusual since they come from very different philosophical traditions. What was it (...) about the climate of the times that led them to such an idea? Is it still viable today? Both philosophers thought that art's audience is not in a position to immediately appreciate works of art—that we are missing something for a direct appreciation or apprehension—so we must take a detour. Why the detours and what are they? Are the detours similar? And are Dewey and Heidegger right about this? The essay that unfolds below attempts to answer these questions.First a definition is in order so we know what the term "detour" means when I use it. What is a detour? It is a deviation from a direct course or the usual procedure; a roundabout way temporarily replacing part of a route; in other words, a bypass or a roundabout way to some destination. The Little Oxford Dictionary adds a different twist on my characterization: "a course that leaves and rejoins [the] direct route."3 Applying this idea to art, we can say that a detour describes an audience who ordinarily perceives an artwork is a legitimate beginning for an appreciation of it, but that course must be bypassed for another (conception) before it can rejoin the direct route (perception). In other words, perceptions in the aesthetic experience must be aided by conceptions—a decidedly Kantian stance taken by Dewey and Heidegger. Their illustrations make my interpretation plausible.One of Heidegger's examples is Van Gogh's painting of a pair of peasant boots.4 He selects this painting to illustrate his metaphysics, which centers around the notion of "equipment." Peasant boots are equipment in [End Page 100] the sense that they are worn or used; the mere thing (like shoes or boots in a store [exhibited] or a closet [in storage]) disappears in use and becomes equipment. Between equipment and mere things—these two categories of being—are artworks. They are pictorial representations of equipment (in Heidegger's illustration; a pair of shoes as mere things could be a pictorial representation, like an advertisement, but it wouldn't be the same). Through the painted boots, a world comes into focus—a network of meaning. The world Heidegger sees in the Van Gogh painting is captured in the following descriptions: "In the vicinity of the [art]work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be…. The art work let us know what shoes are in truth" (ATCR 233). So the nature of art is still a question about the nature of representation for Heidegger: it is what the shoes disclose to us about human existence. As he says, it is not just merely a pair of shoes portrayed but shoes "from the dark opening of the worn insides … the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth" (ATCR 232). In other words, we see the difficult labor that this particular owner toiled with in her daily chores.In Tralbaut's book, he quotes Heidegger in a caption alongside the painting: "Engraving in the intimate obscurity of the hollow of a boot is the weariness of the steps of work. The rough and solid weight of the clog tells of the slow and obstinate trudge across the fields."5 Heidegger continues in the same vein:In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The individual-community relationship has always been one of the most fundamental topics of social sciences. In sociology, this is known as the micro-macro relationship while in economics it refers to the processes, through which, individual actions lead to macroeconomic phenomena. Based on philosophical discourse and systems theory, many sociologists even use the term "emergence" in their understanding of micro-macro relationship, which refers to collective phenomena that are created by the cooperation of individuals, but cannot be reduced to individual actions. (...) "Emergence" theories attempt to explain the nature of society as a complex system by examining how individuals and their relationships lead to the creation of integrated and macro-social phenomena such as markets, educational systems, cultural beliefs, and shared social practices. As a prelude to activity, every researcher has to answer the question from the methodological point of view, how is it possible to study the behavior of social groups and how can we gain knowledge about the laws related to social groups? Anyone who deals with humanities and social sciences or any reality and phenomenon that affects human beings, inevitably deals with the reality that is emerging. In fact, emergence occurs when one level of reality emerges radically from another level. Examples of emergent levels of reality include how the mind emerges from the body; or the way society emerges from human beings. Therefore, when there is an emerging factor, different scientific disciplines should be used, because it is inevitable to talk about social affairs, psychology and neurobiology, as well as physical and even chemical. -/- INTRODUCTION Since its beginning in the 19th century, sociology has faced the fundamental question of what a social phenomena stands for? At a glance, sociologists deal with the study of social groups, collective behavior, institutions, social structures, social networks, and social dynamics, and ultimately all such phenomena are composed of individuals. Therefore, social phenomena seem to have no independent ontological status, and in this case, sociology is ultimately about reducible individuals. Different approaches about the micro-macro relationship, using the concept of "emergence", argue that although collective phenomena are created by individuals, they cannot be reduced to individual action. The term "emergence" is used to distinguish "emergent results" from " Procedural results". Results are called Procedural that can only be calculated by adding or subtracting the causes that act together. On the contrary, they are emergent outcomes that are qualitatively novel compared to the causes from which they originate. An example of such emergent results is mental characteristics that emerge from neural processes, but are not considered among the characteristics of neural processes of components - which are their origin. Philosophical debates about emergentism and reductionism focus on the mind-brain relationship, but as many philosophers have noted, they can be generalized to apply to any hierarchical set of features. The cognitive revolution reactivated a 19th century controversy between theorists of Identity and dualism. The theorists of Identity believe in reductionist materialism and elimination of metaphysics, according to which the mind is nothing more than the biological, while the dualists believe that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. Emergence has been considered as a third way between the theories of Identity and dualism. -/- METHODOLOGY Interdisciplinarity Is fundamentally indicated by the dominance of open systems as well as social and emerging systems at different levels. Therefore, as long as we are facing a new emergentism, there will necessarily be different fields and an interdisciplinary method. The commonality of social sciences and cognitive sciences on the issue of emergence provides the possibility of interaction and exchange of concepts between these two for deeper research. Therefore, in this research, apart from the concepts of Subvenience and downward causation, we have used multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, which are used to explain the emerging concept in cognitive sciences, including neurobiology, psychology, and philosophy. For analytical and interdisciplinary approaches, after examining the concepts of subvenience, and wildly disjunctive, Individualistic and collectivist emergentism have been reviewed. And then their adequacy is criticized and evaluated in meeting strong emergence conditions. -/- FINDINGS Philosophers of the mind have been able to define the conditions of irreducibility and downward causation, which are essential for strong emergence, by using the principle of subvenience with the help of multiple realization and wildly disjunctive principles. Therefore, by definition, emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and emergentist collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the challenges facing the two methodological approaches of individualism and collectivism leads us to three unresolved issues about the emerging phenomenon, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. Despite the differences in the stances of these two approaches regarding the aforementioned triple problems, individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and some others are irreducible due to their complexity, the determination of which, depends on the case study of the mechanism of emergence of each social characteristic. -/- CONCLUSION An emergence that is consistent with reductionism is called a weak emergence. And strong emergence includes the principle of irreducibility and downward causality. According to strong emergence, the characteristics of social phenomena have downward causal power, which cannot be reduced to the causal forces. The principle of subvenience, together with multiple realization and wildly disjunctive, can provide the conditions of irreducibility and downward causality, which are essential conditions of strong emergence. Based on the philosophical analysis of two methodological approaches, individualist and collectivist, it can be concluded that emergentist individualism suffers from the problem of how to explain downward causality and irreducibility, and reification collectivism faces the challenge of reification. The analysis of the problems faced by these two approaches leads us to three unresolved issues, which are realism, downward causality, and mechanism. individualist emergentists acknowledge the existence of emergent social characteristics, but despite this, they believe that these characteristics are not real but merely analytical constructs that require explanation based on individuals and their mutual actions. But collectivists argue that emergentism yields a categorical ontology and supports social realism. They accept the dependence of social characteristics on individuals, but claim that social entities and structures are ontologically independent. Individualists and collectivists both agree that some social characteristics are reducible; and others are irreducible due to their complexity; and the only way to recognize this is to engage in empirical studies of the mechanisms and temporal processes of "emergence" that create social characteristics. -/- NOVELTY The newness of this compact article is as follows: a) Presenting an interdisciplinary approach using the analysis of philosophy of cognitive sciences, including the philosophy of mind, neurobiology and psychology to formulate the issue of social emergence; b) Criticizing individualist and collectivist methodological approaches to the issue of social emergence and explaining the sufficiency and shortcomings of both in providing weak and strong emerging conditions; c) Explaining and categorizing the challenges facing methodological approaches in explaining the phenomenon of social emergence, in three categories: realism, downward causality, and mechanism. BIBLIOGRAPHY Beckermann, A., Flohr, H., & Kim, J. (eds.) (1992). Emergence or reduction? Essays on the prospects of nonreductive physicalism. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of Naturalism. New York: Routledge. Bhaskar, R., Danermark, B. & Price, L. (2018). Interdisciplinarity and wellbeing: A critical realist general theory of interdisciplinarity. London and New York: Routledge. Blau, P.M. (1981). Introduction: diverse views of social structure and their common denominator. In Blau, P.M. & Merton, R.K. (eds.), Continuity in Structural Inquiry (pp. 1–23). Beverly Hills: Sage. Blau, P.M. (1987). Microprocess and macrostructure. In K.S. Cook (ed.), Social Exchange Theory (pp. 83–100). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Brooks, R.A., & Maes, P. (eds). (1994). Artificial life IV; proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Coleman, J. S. (1987). Microfoundations and macrosocial behavior. In: J. C. Alexander, B. Giesen, R. Munch, & Neil J. Smelser (Eds.). The Micro-Macro Link (pp. 153–73). Berkeley: University of California. Coleman, J. S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elster, J. (1985). Making sense of Marx. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fodor, J.A. (1974). Special sciences (Or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis). Synthese, 28(2), 97–115. Fodor, J.A. (1989). Making mind matter more. Philosophical Topics, 17, 59-79. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hempel, C.G. (1965). Aspects of scientific explanation and other essays in the philosophy of science. New York: The Free Press. Horgan, T. (1993). From supervenience to superdupervenience: meeting the demands of a material world. Mind, 102, 555-586. Humphreys, P. (1997). How properties emerge”. Philosophy of Science, 64, 1-17. Kim, J. (1999). Making sense of emergence. Philosophical Studies, 95, 3–36. Kincaid, H. (1997). Individualism and the unity of science. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Lewis, D.K. (1986). The plurality of worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nigel, G., & Conte, R. (eds.) (1995). Artificial societies; The computer simulation of social life. London: UCL Press. O’Connor, T. (1994). Emergent properties. American Philosophical Quarterly, 31, 91-104. Popper, K.R. (1968). Conjectures and refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row. Sawyer, R. K. (2001). Emergence in sociology: contemporary philosophy of mind and some implications for sociological theory. American Journal of Sociology, 107, 551-585. Sawyer, R. K. (2004). The mechanisms of emergence. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34, 260–282. Sawyer, R. K. (2005). Social emergence: societies as complex systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sawyer, R.K. (2003). Nonreductive individualism: Part 2, Social causation. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 33, 203–224. Winch, P. (1993). The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy‭ (SAMT, Trans.). Tehran, Iran: SAMT. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 483-506 [Access article in PDF] Lorenzo Valla and the Traditions and Transmissions of Philosophy C. S. Celenza Johns Hopkins University What is "philosophy"? Who is a "philosopher"? These questions underlay much of Salvatore Camporeale's work, and they are deeper than one might suppose. We can begin with one of Camporeale's favorite figures, Lorenzo Valla, and listen to one of the ways (...) he answered these questions. In the introduction to his work reforming Aristotelian logic, the Repastinatio totius dialectice, Valla situates the debate on wisdom by recalling the case of Pythagoras.1 "What a marvelous praise of modesty it was," Valla wrote, when Pythagoras, asked whether he considered himself wise, replied that he was not "wise," but was rather a "lover of wisdom"—not sophos, but philosophos.2 Valla uses here a humanistic trope, found also in Petrarch's advice to Luigi Marsili, to the effect that Marsili should shape the practice of his life in order to become a "verae sapientiae amator," a "lover of true wisdom."3These citations from Petrarch and Valla alert us to the well-studied fact that, in the view of some humanists, academic "philosophy" had usurped the name "philosophy" and the self-searching meaning behind it. Certain humanists were proposing an alternative notion of what wisdom signified and consequently of what philosophy itself—the "love of wisdom"—represented. It seemed that wisdom needed to be located in a more persuasive way in the world of human beings, history, and language, rather than in one of eternal [End Page 483] suprahuman essences; in short, "philosophy" had to be brought closer to rhetoric and philology.The goal of this paper is to examine this idea in a twofold manner: through the history of terms and concepts as these are refracted by and through the history of institutionalized learning; and through a brief foray into Valla's preface to his great critique of western logic. There has been a lot of challenging and interesting work on this topic in the last few decades. At the same time, there may be cause to wonder whether relatively recent historians have unwittingly become too bogged down in names, failing to see the real conflict. They have tended to assume that the modern, sharp separation of humanistic "disciplines," such as rhetoric and philosophy, existed in the same way and with the same force of conviction in the premodern era. True, there are famous ancient, medieval, and early modern examples of self-defined "philosophers" differentiating themselves from "philologists" and vice versa, most notably Seneca, who—lamenting the professionalization of education in his day—complained in a letter that "what was once philosophy, has become philology" (Ep. 108.23). Yet, the more one investigates this problem, and the more one peers beneath the surface of the seemingly stark divisions between "philosophy" and "philology," the more difficult this strong separation is to maintain.This notion of the possible interpenetrability of "philosophy," and "philology," and "rhetoric" as concepts was probably easier to understand in the Renaissance than it is now. The differences between the Renaissance and our own era lie in institutional context and personal approach, both of which have been, for about six or seven intellectual generations now (but no more than that), supported by a fourfold set of assumptions about what "real" or "professional" philosophy represents: first, that philosophy is primarily about metaphysics and ontology, or rather that there exists a hierarchy in which metaphysics and ontology stand at the top; other things, such as history, language, or rhetoric are "just not philosophy." Second, a retrospectively understood Cartesian split between mind and body is basically true (and that it is legitimate to project that dualistic split back onto thinkers who did not hold the same sort of dualism as axiomatic); and consequently third, that epistemology should be privileged, that is, that knowing and the study of how knowing happens are primarily what philosophy is about. Hence "philosophy" is regulative, a master-discipline that oversees the truth claims of all... (shrink)

Despite the growing recognition for the need to improve the health of prisoners in Canada and the need for health research, there has been little discussion of the ethical issues with regards to health research with prisoners in Canada. The purpose of this paper is to encourage a national conversation about what it means to conduct ethically sound health research with prisoners given the current realities of the Canadian system. Lessons from the Canadian system could presumably apply in other jurisdictions. (...) Any discussion regarding research ethics with Canadian prisoners must begin by first taking into account the disproportionate number of Indigenous prisoners and the high proportion of prisoners suffering from mental illnesses. The main ethical challenges that researchers must navigate are the power imbalances between them, the correctional services staff, and the prisoners, and the effects this has on obtaining voluntary consent to research; and, the various challenges associated to protecting the privacy and confidentiality of study participants who are prisoners. In order to solve these challenges, a first step would be to develop clear and transparent processes for ethical health research, which ought to be informed by multiple stakeholders, including prisoners, the correctional services staff, and researchers themselves. Stakeholder and community engagement ought to occur in Canada with regards to ethical health research with prisoners that should also include consultation with various parties, including prisoners, correctional services staff, and researchers. It is important that national and provincial research ethics organizations examine the sufficiency of existing research ethics guidance and, where there are gaps, to develop guidelines and help craft policy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 483-506 [Access article in PDF] Lorenzo Valla and the Traditions and Transmissions of Philosophy C. S. Celenza Johns Hopkins University What is "philosophy"? Who is a "philosopher"? These questions underlay much of Salvatore Camporeale's work, and they are deeper than one might suppose. We can begin with one of Camporeale's favorite figures, Lorenzo Valla, and listen to one of the ways (...) he answered these questions. In the introduction to his work reforming Aristotelian logic, the Repastinatio totius dialectice, Valla situates the debate on wisdom by recalling the case of Pythagoras.1 "What a marvelous praise of modesty it was," Valla wrote, when Pythagoras, asked whether he considered himself wise, replied that he was not "wise," but was rather a "lover of wisdom"—not sophos, but philosophos.2 Valla uses here a humanistic trope, found also in Petrarch's advice to Luigi Marsili, to the effect that Marsili should shape the practice of his life in order to become a "verae sapientiae amator," a "lover of true wisdom."3These citations from Petrarch and Valla alert us to the well-studied fact that, in the view of some humanists, academic "philosophy" had usurped the name "philosophy" and the self-searching meaning behind it. Certain humanists were proposing an alternative notion of what wisdom signified and consequently of what philosophy itself—the "love of wisdom"—represented. It seemed that wisdom needed to be located in a more persuasive way in the world of human beings, history, and language, rather than in one of eternal [End Page 483] suprahuman essences; in short, "philosophy" had to be brought closer to rhetoric and philology.The goal of this paper is to examine this idea in a twofold manner: through the history of terms and concepts as these are refracted by and through the history of institutionalized learning; and through a brief foray into Valla's preface to his great critique of western logic. There has been a lot of challenging and interesting work on this topic in the last few decades. At the same time, there may be cause to wonder whether relatively recent historians have unwittingly become too bogged down in names, failing to see the real conflict. They have tended to assume that the modern, sharp separation of humanistic "disciplines," such as rhetoric and philosophy, existed in the same way and with the same force of conviction in the premodern era. True, there are famous ancient, medieval, and early modern examples of self-defined "philosophers" differentiating themselves from "philologists" and vice versa, most notably Seneca, who—lamenting the professionalization of education in his day—complained in a letter that "what was once philosophy, has become philology" (Ep. 108.23). Yet, the more one investigates this problem, and the more one peers beneath the surface of the seemingly stark divisions between "philosophy" and "philology," the more difficult this strong separation is to maintain.This notion of the possible interpenetrability of "philosophy," and "philology," and "rhetoric" as concepts was probably easier to understand in the Renaissance than it is now. The differences between the Renaissance and our own era lie in institutional context and personal approach, both of which have been, for about six or seven intellectual generations now (but no more than that), supported by a fourfold set of assumptions about what "real" or "professional" philosophy represents: first, that philosophy is primarily about metaphysics and ontology, or rather that there exists a hierarchy in which metaphysics and ontology stand at the top; other things, such as history, language, or rhetoric are "just not philosophy." Second, a retrospectively understood Cartesian split between mind and body is basically true (and that it is legitimate to project that dualistic split back onto thinkers who did not hold the same sort of dualism as axiomatic); and consequently third, that epistemology should be privileged, that is, that knowing and the study of how knowing happens are primarily what philosophy is about. Hence "philosophy" is regulative, a master-discipline that oversees the truth claims of all... (shrink)

The authors' novel approach to some interesting mathematical concepts - not normally taught in other courses - places them in a historical and philosophical setting. Although primarily intended for mathematics undergraduates, the book will also appeal to students in the sciences, humanities and education with a strong interest in this subject. The first part proceeds from about 1800 BC to 1800 AD, discussing, for example, the Renaissance method for solving cubic and quartic equations and providing rigorous elementary proof that (...) certain geometrical problems posed by the ancient Greeks cannot be solved by ruler and compass alone. The second part presents some fundamental topics of interest from the past two centuries, including proof of G del's incompleteness theorem, together with a discussion of its implications. (shrink)

A welcome reprint of a classical study in the theory of value first published in 1958. This, a comprehensive empirical study of values, culminates in the pivotal concept of selective system that "first came to light in the description of the purposive act." A descriptive definition of a selective system is offered after a detailed and painstaking examination of sources of value. "A selective system is a structural process by which a unitary dynamic agency is channeled in such (...) a way that it generates particular acts, dispositions, or objects, and also activates a specific selective agency by which some of the trials are rejected and others are incorporated into the dynamic operation of the system." Selective systems are viewed as natural norms. The ethical import of selective systems is argued in Ethics published in 1960. In terms of Pepper's development of a world hypothesis, The Sources of Value occupies a unique place in his philosophical enterprise. In Concept and Quality, a sequel to World Hypotheses and a discussion and formulation of a new world hypothesis called "Selectivism," the whole analysis in The Sources of Value provides the root metaphor.--A. S. C. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 (2006) 559-575 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Kant's Critical Concepts of MotionKonstantin PollokThere are two significant places in Kant's Critical corpus where he discusses the concept of motion. The first is in the Critique of Pure Reason, where in the "Deduction of the Categories" Kant writes:Motion, as an act of the subject (not as a determination of an object†), and therefore the (...) synthesis of the manifold in space, first produces the concept of succession—if we abstract from this manifold and attend solely to the act through which we determine the inner sense according to its form.In this passage Kant simply refers to the concept of motion, and the immediate context in which this reference occurs reveals little about what he means by it. In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, however, motion plays a more significant role, and, concomitantly, it is in his writings on natural science that Kant most fully expresses his thoughts on the subject. For present purposes, the most relevant passage is paragraph 15 of the Preface of the Metaphysical Foundations, where Kant says that theconcept of matter had … to be carried through all four of the indicated functions of the concepts of the understanding (in four chapters), where in each a new determination of this concept was added. The basic determination of something that is [End Page 559] to be an object of the outer senses had to be motion, because only thereby can these senses be affected. The understanding traces back all other predicates of matter belonging to its nature to this, and natural science, therefore, is either a pure or applied doctrine of motion. The metaphysical foundations of natural science are therefore to be brought under four chapters. The first considers motion as a pure quantum in accordance with its composition, without any quality of the movable, and may be called phoronomy. The second takes into consideration motion as belonging to the quality of matter, under the name of an original moving force, and is therefore called dynamics. The third considers matter with this quality as in relation to another through its own inherent motion, and therefore appears under the name of mechanics. The fourth chapter, however, determines matter's motion or rest merely in relation to the mode of representation or modality, and thus as appearance of the outer senses, and is called phenomenology. 2The first passage from the first Critique (quoted above) reveals both that the concept of motion plays a central role in Kant's epistemology and that he distinguishes clearly between motion of the object, on the one hand, and action of the subject, on the other. The two concepts of motion are quite different—the former belonging to transcendental philosophy and geometry (to "pure science" in the Kantian sense), the latter to the metaphysical and empirical investigation of nature. By contrast, the second passage from the Metaphysical Foundations shows that the conceptual apparatus Kant developed in his transcendental philosophy is also relevant for understanding the empirical concept of motion. Since all empirical concepts are based on transcendental conditions for their possibility, this connection between elements of the Critical philosophy should come as no surprise. What remains unclear, however, is the sort of connection involved, and whether in the particular case of motion there might not be a more intimate relationship between the transcendental conditions and the empirical concept than one might at first suspect.Indeed, this is a possibility that has been entertained by a number of commentators. In his investigation of Kant's metaphysics of nature, Lothar Schäfer, for example, contends that "the original perspective on the unity of the sensibility in which nature reveals itself, and which belongs to the conception of nature, results in the original perspective on motion. Therefore, the laws of nature are laws of motion …." 3 Similarly, in her book on Kant's theory of natural science, Karen Gloy argues thatin the predicable 'motion' the connection of elements of the understanding with... (shrink)

Michael Lynch’s Truth as One and Many is a contribution to the large body of philosophical literature on the nature of truth. Within that genre, advocates of truth-as-correspondence, advocates of truth-as-coherence, and the like, all hold that truth has a single underlying metaphysical nature, but they sharply disagree as to what this nature is. Lynch argues that many of these views make good sense of truth attributions for a limited stretch of discourse, but he adds that each of the contenders (...) also faces a ‘scope problem’, in that none of them makes sense of all legitimate truth attributions. Some deflationists make similar observations – usually less concessive – and conclude that truth simply has no substantial, underlying nature. There is nothing for the philosopher to articulate and defend. Lynch agrees with deflationists that the realm of discourse is too diverse for any single ‘first-level’ property, such as correspondence or coherence, to fully characterize it, but against deflationism, he holds that truth does have a nature. He presents a functionalist theory. The definition is this: x is true if, and only if, x has a property that plays the truth-role. According to Lynch, the truth-role is given in terms of what he calls the ‘core truisms’ of the folk concept of truth. These are platitudes that hold of the everyday notion, and are such that anyone who denies all of them can be accused of changing the subject – of not talking about truth. A given property T plays the truth-role for a batch of propositions, just in case, for any proposition P in the batch: P is T if, and only if, where P is believed, things are as they are believed to be; other things being equal, it is a worthy goal …. (shrink)

At the opening of Spinoza’s Ethics, we find the three celebrated definitions of substance, attribute, and God: E1d3: By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed [Per substantiam intelligo id quod in se est et per se concipitur; hoc est id cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei, a quo formari debeat]. E1d4: By attribute I understand what (...) the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence [Per attributum intelligo id, quod intellectus de substantia percipit, tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens]. E1d6: By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence We are accustomed to think of these paramount definitions as a fixed and settled formulation of the core of Spinoza’s metaphysics, but if we look at the development of Spinoza’s thought, the picture we get is quite different. In the early drafts of the Ethics and in his early works, Spinoza seems to have experimented with various conceptualizations of the relations between substance, attribute, and God. Some of Spinoza’s works make barely any use of the notions of substance and attribute, and the testimony of Spinoza’s letters suggests that, at a certain stage in his philosophical development, the concept of attribute may have been put on the back burner, if not completely dropped. Indeed, another closely related concept—accident [accidens]—was fated to be pulled out of the system (and for good reasons ). The final version of the Ethics makes hardly any use of this notion, but Spinoza’s letters show that in early drafts of the Ethics he used the term ‘accident’ to refer to what cannot be or be conceived without substance. In this paper I will attempt to provide a brief outline of the genealogy of Spinoza’s key metaphysical concepts. This genealogy, like any other, can help us to reexamine and reconsider what seems to us natural, stable and obvious. In the first part of the paper, I rely on Spinoza’s letters to trace the development of his definitions of substance and attribute in the early drafts of the Ethics. The letters, whose dates are more or less established, also provide a temporal grid for our subsequent discussions. The second part surveys Spinoza’s discussion and conceptualization of substance and attributes in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, the Theological-Political Treatise (1670), and briefly, Spinoza’s 1663 book on Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, and its appendix on Metaphysical Thoughts, the Cogitata Metaphysica. The third part of the paper is dedicated to Spinoza’s understanding of substance and attribute in the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being. I conclude with some remarks on the stability of Spinoza’s final position on the issue, as expressed in the published version of the Ethics . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 483-506 [Access article in PDF] Lorenzo Valla and the Traditions and Transmissions of Philosophy C. S. Celenza Johns Hopkins University What is "philosophy"? Who is a "philosopher"? These questions underlay much of Salvatore Camporeale's work, and they are deeper than one might suppose. We can begin with one of Camporeale's favorite figures, Lorenzo Valla, and listen to one of the ways (...) he answered these questions. In the introduction to his work reforming Aristotelian logic, the Repastinatio totius dialectice, Valla situates the debate on wisdom by recalling the case of Pythagoras.1 "What a marvelous praise of modesty it was," Valla wrote, when Pythagoras, asked whether he considered himself wise, replied that he was not "wise," but was rather a "lover of wisdom"—not sophos, but philosophos.2 Valla uses here a humanistic trope, found also in Petrarch's advice to Luigi Marsili, to the effect that Marsili should shape the practice of his life in order to become a "verae sapientiae amator," a "lover of true wisdom."3These citations from Petrarch and Valla alert us to the well-studied fact that, in the view of some humanists, academic "philosophy" had usurped the name "philosophy" and the self-searching meaning behind it. Certain humanists were proposing an alternative notion of what wisdom signified and consequently of what philosophy itself—the "love of wisdom"—represented. It seemed that wisdom needed to be located in a more persuasive way in the world of human beings, history, and language, rather than in one of eternal [End Page 483] suprahuman essences; in short, "philosophy" had to be brought closer to rhetoric and philology.The goal of this paper is to examine this idea in a twofold manner: through the history of terms and concepts as these are refracted by and through the history of institutionalized learning; and through a brief foray into Valla's preface to his great critique of western logic. There has been a lot of challenging and interesting work on this topic in the last few decades. At the same time, there may be cause to wonder whether relatively recent historians have unwittingly become too bogged down in names, failing to see the real conflict. They have tended to assume that the modern, sharp separation of humanistic "disciplines," such as rhetoric and philosophy, existed in the same way and with the same force of conviction in the premodern era. True, there are famous ancient, medieval, and early modern examples of self-defined "philosophers" differentiating themselves from "philologists" and vice versa, most notably Seneca, who—lamenting the professionalization of education in his day—complained in a letter that "what was once philosophy, has become philology" (Ep. 108.23). Yet, the more one investigates this problem, and the more one peers beneath the surface of the seemingly stark divisions between "philosophy" and "philology," the more difficult this strong separation is to maintain.This notion of the possible interpenetrability of "philosophy," and "philology," and "rhetoric" as concepts was probably easier to understand in the Renaissance than it is now. The differences between the Renaissance and our own era lie in institutional context and personal approach, both of which have been, for about six or seven intellectual generations now (but no more than that), supported by a fourfold set of assumptions about what "real" or "professional" philosophy represents: first, that philosophy is primarily about metaphysics and ontology, or rather that there exists a hierarchy in which metaphysics and ontology stand at the top; other things, such as history, language, or rhetoric are "just not philosophy." Second, a retrospectively understood Cartesian split between mind and body is basically true (and that it is legitimate to project that dualistic split back onto thinkers who did not hold the same sort of dualism as axiomatic); and consequently third, that epistemology should be privileged, that is, that knowing and the study of how knowing happens are primarily what philosophy is about. Hence "philosophy" is regulative, a master-discipline that oversees the truth claims of all... (shrink)

German Lutheran scholar Johann Friedrich Weitenkampf (d.1758) sets out to explain and refute the Turkish concept of fate, dividing his dissertation into two sections: the first outlining the Turkish-Muslim view of fate; and the second seeking to prove the invalidity of the Muslim concept of fate with philosophical argumentation. He begins with some brief notes on the historical origin of the Turks, turning then to the backstory of the Qur’an, which he claims can be divided into six sections or (...) topics, the last of which concerns its teachings on fate. According to Weitenkampf, in mainstream Islamic thought, fate is predetermined and immutable. Weitenkampf categorizes most Turks as Jabrites who believe that God is the source of all evil and that men do not have free will. Therefore, men are compelled to do evil or good through God’s omnipotence. He offers examples of how this belief is manifested in the actions and values of the Turks. According to Weitenkampf, since Turks believe in predestination, they do not flee plague-ridden cities or shun contact with those infected. They do not fear death. If they suffer, they believe fate decreed it. In battle, this makes them brave to the point of foolhardy. Weitenkampf also paraphrases an exhortation from the Qur’an in which Muslims are told not to avoid danger, as God has already determined their fate. . . . Weitenkampf’s dissertatio is a symptom of the struggle between the weakened Lutheran orthodoxy and the rise of Pietism and rationalism in the wake of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Unlike other Lutheran authors, he analyzes Islamic thought through systematic philosophical argumentation, deeply influenced by his logic and metaphysics teacher Knutzen, who tried to combine Wolffan Enlightenment rationalism with pietistic spirituality. (shrink)

In theOrigin of the work of art, Heidegger claimed that the work of art opens to us thetruth of Being, the opening of the world. Two problematics arise from this. First, his idea of “world-disclosure” evoked a sense ofeverydayness(which captures, for me, the idea of credulism in perception). Second, the senses oftruth,Being, andworldare metaphysically condensed. Hence the question: how then could the “truth of Being” or the “world” that artworks reveal be experienced? Among other ways (mimesis, imagination, perception, etc.) (...) by which artworks are experienced, I choose to examine perception since it confirms this idea ofeverydayness. The questions that confront us to this effect are: can perception lead us into, to encounter, this world opened by artworks? Does the nervous/visual system suffice to enter into that world in which the artist invites us? This is where Richir becomes important. In response to the first problem, he shows that the “perception” (experience) of artworks is beyond mereeverydaynesssince artworks open for us a world that “never was” and “never will be” (i.e., “virtuality” and not a veridical sense ofeverydaynessas captured in the perceptive act that is object-related). This is because the material stuff or object given in perception is neutralized by thephantasiato become what Richir callsSache. ThisSacheis in itself a phenomenon that is disclosed in artworks. In response to the second problem, Richir shows how artworks cannot disclose just metaphysical categories ofBeing, truth, or world. The disclosure has to be phenomenological, corporeal, and affective. He therefore proposes another mode of “perception” beyondmere perceptionin a revolutionary interpretation of the husserlian “perceptive”phantasia.With this, he shows how the aforementioned metaphysical condensations are liveable in experience. I concretize this with an illustration from the theater. Finally, I suggest participation as a phenomenological approach that can make both Heidegger’s and Richir’s intuitions meaningful. (shrink)

Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition has recently been criticised on the grounds that it conceives of the relationship between recognition and power in terms of an opposition. According to Honneth’s critics, this is too simple because recognition and power are often intertwined. My aim in this article is twofold: On the one hand, I seek to understand why Honneth conceives of recognition and power as opposed. As I will argue, this is not the result of bad theorising; rather, there are (...) important methodological considerations that account for this conception – specifically, the idea that one can develop an immanent critique of power in line with the tradition of the Frankfurt School only by adopting the participant perspective. On the other hand, I agree with the gist of what Honneth’s critics say and want to make a systematic proposal as to why opposing recognition and power is too simple. This proposal will build on the argument developed in the first part and will consist in the claim that to treat recognition and power as opposed is to consider recognition relations exclusively from the participant perspective in contrast to the observer perspective. As a result, the potential entanglement of recognition with problematic social arrangements cannot come into view. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the use of public reason requirements in bioethical discourse and discusses when such requirements are warranted. By a “public reason requirement,” I mean a requirement that those involved in a particular discourse or debate only use reasons that can properly be described as public reasons. The first part of the paper outlines the concept of public reasons as developed by John Rawls and others and discusses some of the general criticisms of the concept and its importance. (...) The second part then distinguishes between two types of public reason requirements in bioethics. One type is what I will call the orthodox public reason requirement since it hews closely to the original Rawlsian conception. The second is what I will call the expansive public reason requirement, which departs quite radically from the Rawlsian conception and applies the requirement not to policy discourse or policymaking, but to the actions of individuals. Both types of requirements will be analyzed, and some problems in applying public reason requirements in bioethics will be identified. It will be argued that the expansive public reason requirement is misguided. The concluding part argues that requirements of civic civility and what Rawls terms an “inclusive view” of public reason should be important in bioethical discourse. (shrink)

The main goal of this chapter is to present the basic components of Anne Conway’s metaphysics of sympathy. To that end, I will explicate her concepts of God or first substance and second substance or Christ with special emphasis on the key role that the second substance plays in her philosophy. I argue that one of the keys to Conway’s system lies in her reinterpretation of the Christian narrative about suffering. She combines Christian imagery with ancient and modern (...) ideas in an attempt to create a philosophy that will appeal to people of all faiths and explain ‘all phenomena in the entire universe’ ). Christ’s role as a metaphysical and moral figure is crucial to Conway’s philosophy and helps explain her views about suffering and the importance of sympathy in her philosophy. (shrink)

Virtues and reasons are two of the most fruitful and important concepts in contemporary moral philosophy. Many writers have commented upon the close connection between virtues and reasons, but no one has done full justice to the complexity of this connection. It is generally recognized that the virtues not only depend upon reasons, but also sometimes provide them. The essays in this volume shed light on precisely how virtues and reasons are related to each other and what can be learned (...) by exploring this relationship. Virtue’s Reasons is divided into three sections, each of them devoted to a general issue regarding the relationship between virtues and reasons. The first section analyzes how the virtues may be related to, or linked with, normative reasons in ways that improve our understanding of what constitutes virtuous character and ethical agency. The second section explores the reasons moral agents have for cultivating the virtues and how the virtues impact moral responsiveness or development. The final section examines how reasons can be employed in understanding the nature of virtue, and how specific virtues, like modesty and practical wisdom, interact with reasons. This book will be of major interest to scholars working on virtue theory, the nature of moral character, and normative ethics. (shrink)

Seminal work by Knobe, Prasada, and Newman (2013) distinguished a set of concepts, which they named “dual‐character concepts.” Unlike traditional concepts, they require two distinct criteria for determining category membership. For example, the prototypical dual‐character concept “artist” has both a concrete dimension of artistic skills, and an abstract dimension of aesthetic sensibility and values. Therefore, someone can be a good artist on the concrete dimension but not truly an artist on the abstract dimension. Does this analysis capture people's understanding of (...) cornerstone social categories, such as gender, around which society and everyday life have traditionally been organized? Gender, too, may be conceived as having not only a concrete dimension but also a distinct dimension of abstract norms and values. As with dual‐character concepts, violations of abstract norms and values may result in someone being judged as not truly a man/woman. Here, we provide the first empirical assessment of applying the dual‐character framework to people's conception of gender. We found that, on some measures that primarily relied on metalinguistic cues, gender concepts did indeed resemble dual‐character concepts. However, on other measures that depicted transgressions of traditional gender norms, neither “man” nor “woman” appeared dual‐character‐like, in that participants did not disqualify people from being truly a man or truly a woman. In a series of follow‐up studies, we examined whether moral norms have come to replace gender role norms for the abstract dimension. Implications for the evolution of concepts and categories are explored. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William James, A Pluralistic Universe. A New Philosophical ReadingRichard A. S. Hall William James, A Pluralistic Universe. A New Philosophical Reading. Ed. H. G. Callaway. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.In 1907 William James was invited to give the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford. Initially he was reluctant to do so since he feared undertaking them would divert him from developing rigorously and systematically some metaphysical ideas (...) of his own that had preoccupied him for some time. [End Page 130]In the end, however, he relented and in the spring of 1908 gave the lectures which were subsequently published as A Pluralistic Universe.As it happened, though, in the course of these lectures James presented some of those metaphysical ideas, though in a popular and informal style appropriate to lecturing. Later on he did get down to working out a systematic metaphysics in proper academic style, but the project was cut short by his untimely death in 1910. The incomplete Some Problems of Philosophy,posthumously published in 1911, recapitulates some major themes of A Pluralistic Universe.When James addressed his Oxford audience, the time was ripe for the advancement of his own brand of metaphysical pluralism and radical empiricism in opposition to the still-regnant forms of monistic idealism as represented by Bradley, Green, and Royce. The hegemony in the philosophical world long enjoyed by idealism was beginning to break up—something noted by James in his first lecture—due in no small part to the very ideas aired in his lectures and the then newly emerging schools of pragmatism and realism. The period between 1914 and 1918 not only rings the death knell of European imperialism but also, significantly, marks the watershed between nineteenth-and twentieth-century philosophy.The argument of A Pluralistic Universerevolves around the Parmenidean conundrum of the one-and-the-many. It is the solution to this problem that was the main bone of contention between James and absolute idealists like F. H. Bradley, T. H. Green, and Josiah Royce. For them, the world in reality is but one thing, though appearing illusorily as many, with a pervasive unity throughout—it is a "block-universe," to use James's expression for it; for James, by contrast, the world is irreducibly many things whose unities are partial and shifting. The gravamen of James's objections to absolute idealism was its monism, though he objected no less strenuously to other ideas associated with it: its doctrine of internal relations; its determinism; and, in particular, its deprecation of experience in favor of concepts (what James condemns as "vicious intellectualism"). James proposed, against this monolithic idealism, the alternative hypothesis of metaphysical pluralism. Here he affirmed the reality of external relations (particularly conjunctions) among things and the continuities within experience, thereby making his empiricism "radical." He approached experience phenomenologically, finding it, not concepts, to be constitutive of reality, the value of concepts being more practical than theoretical. He conceived of the universe as being open-ended, where human agency can make a difference for the better.A subtext of A Pluralistic Universeis James's advocacy of something like [End Page 131]traditional theism in contradistinction to the pantheism of absolute idealism. He rightly notes that the Absolute is not the God of Christianity. He believes that his pluralistic ontology allows for, and the religious experiences of people abundantly attest to, the existence of a personal God, albeit a finite one, with whom communion and commerce is possible. At a deeper, psychological level, though, A Pluralistic Universeis an expression of James's own desire to feel "at home" in the universe, a desire, I should add, that he shares with many protagonists of classic American fiction, and which is perhaps intensified by the experience of inhabiting and accommodating one's self to the relatively unfamiliar New World. He complains about the "foreignness" of the Absolute in objective idealism and of that sovereign God, in traditional theisms, subsisting beyond all human influence or effects.Howard Callaway's recent edition of James's Hibbert Lectures joins the Harvard edition of them, with a foreword by Richard J. Bernstein, as an indispensable volume of James's... (shrink)

Aquinas held that the metaphysical consideration of beings as being consists in the consideration of being as created, i.e., the consideration of things in their complete reality, and the reduction of this complete reality to its complete cause. When existence displaces form as the primary sense of being, the thing’s act of existing is conceived of as ‘formal’ with respect to its essence. Consequently, the primary object of metaphysical consideration becomes the complete entity, a composite of essence and existence, and (...) the primary sense of being becomes the subsistence of the complete entity. In Aquinas’s creationist discourse, the term supposit denotes the concept of the entitative whole or complete entity. What this concept of the supposit adds to the Aristotelian conception of the concrete individual derives from the contingency of existence in every being beyond the first being. The subject of a nature and of categorical accidents is now also conceived of as the subject of a received act of existing. Aquinas reduces the distinctions of finite entities to their possession of acts of existing that are diverse absolutely, in virtue of a ‘privation’ of the fullness of existence, just as Aristotle reduces formal contrariety to the possession or ‘privation’ of differences that are diverse absolutely. And as Plato traced the negations constitutive of formal contrariety to a correlative participation between being and otherness, Aquinas analogously traced the distinctions of finite entities to a transcendental duality between participated existence and receiving essence. The necessary participation of each of these principles of finite being in divine and infinite existence constitutes the ultimate metaphysical reduction and horizon of a creationist metaphysics. (shrink)

This article considers revolution as a political clash and revolutionism as an aesthetic position, which is a topic inspired by the philosophical, social, and aesthetic experience of the twentieth century. This topic has been considered on the eve of the 100-year anniversary of the October Revolution. The author proceeds from the claim that one of the theatrical geniuses, Vsevolod E. Meyerhold, was, above all, a man of politics, while the other, Yevgeny B. Vakhtangov, was first and foremost a man (...) of art. The revolutionary pathos of Vakhtangov’s work is paradoxically actualized through the concept of myth and compassion as an alternative to cruelty and destruction. The personality of Meyerhold is described within the context of the revolutionary scene and in the unique mode of revolutionary nature and action. The experience of these theatrical geniuses in all their personal contradictions and artistic difference shows that it is possible to live during a time of revolution, but it is impossible to live in a constant state of revolution. Only creativity, as a source of hope and harmony, is an alternative to chaos and destruction. (shrink)

This is perhaps the most original and important treatise on moral philosophy since the publication of Rawls’s Theory of Justice. It commands attention both in terms of its comprehensive scope and argumentative rigor in attempting to offer a theory of moral justification by way of establishing a supreme principle of morality through an analysis of the concept of action and the application of reason to action. The main thesis is "that every agent by the fact of engaging in action, is (...) logically committed to the acceptance of certain evaluative and deontic judgments and ultimately of a supreme moral principle, the Principle of Generic Consistency, which requires that he respect his recipients’ necessary conditions of action. To prove this thesis, I have argued that the very possibility of rational interpersonal action depends upon the adherence to the morality that is grounded in this principle." The book contains five lengthy chapters. The first three chapters set forth the theoretical phase of the work; the last two concern the direct and indirect applications of the Principle of Generic Consistency. (shrink)

‘Recognition’ is a normative concept denoting the ascription of positive status to a group or an individual by (an) other(s). In its larger meaning, it carries the implication that when a group or an individual can justifiably expect such a positive status-ascription, its denial (misrecognition) is unjustified and unethical. I discuss the role that the concept of recognition can play at the intersection of two philosophies, pragmatism and contemporary critical theory. My perspective is one that embraces the ‘pragmatic turn’ in (...) critical theory and sees the possibility of reciprocal benefit for pragmatism in how critical theory handles issues of material culture, alienation and networks of power. I argue that a critical social theory incorporating pragmatist presuppositions ought to bring the concept of recognition to bear in how it isolates and treats the ‘real interests’ of groups and individuals who have suffered and continue to suffer from broad social ascriptions of negative status, or who, through lack of voice and access to the public sphere, remain paralysed to participation in a thriving liberal democracy. In doing so, I do not construe recognition primarily as ‘positive tolerance’ or understanding of cultural, ethnic, or gender identity, but as a minimally substantive tool for understanding, and potentially correcting, how misrecognition impacts the collective and individual agency of the historically oppressed. (shrink)

Many scholars, including G. A. Cohen, Daniel Attas, and George Brenkert, have denied that a Kantian defense of self-ownership is possible. Kant's ostensible hostility to self-ownership can be resolved, however, upon reexamination of the Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals. Moreover, two novel Kantian defenses of self-ownership (narrowly construed) can be devised. The first shows that maxims of exploitation and paternalism that violate self-ownership cannot be universalized, as this leads to contradictions in conception. The second shows that (...) physical coercion against rational agents involves a profound status wrong--namely, their treatment as children or animals--and that this system of differential status and treatment (including self-ownership rights for rational agents) can be morally justified by our capacity for autonomy. (shrink)

Concerned with the issue of the I-thou encounter and the question of how to overcome the problem of the confrontation that occurs in the worldly existence among individuals, the Japanese philosopher Ueda Shizuteru (1926-), a leading member of the Kyoto School, addressed this issue in his phenomenology of the self. Ueda develops his ideas as a hermeneutical practice in the reading of the well-known Zen classic parable Ten Ox-Herding pictures, given that Zen Buddhism is the main tradition upon which he (...) critically and creatively draws. In accordance with Zen, Ueda argues that the emptied self is a non-self self boundlessly open and compassionate. As a result, the selfless self is open to the other in such a way that a genuine encounter with the other can take place. In the encounter, the closed ego realizes that its self-identity includes also its self-negation, such that, for the selfless self the other’s concerns are one’s concerns. The main aim of this contribution is to look at Ueda’s understanding of the interpersonal relations in what he conceives as a twofold world, that is, the worldly existence and the infinite openness that imbues this existence. In the infinite openness, the fundamental difference between self and other disappears into the state where the individual becomes emptiness while maintaining their “otherness” as separate and distinct. It means that the nullified self still preserves its identity, the other is accepted as different, and at the same time both share this common selfless ground. Thus, a particular conception of identity arises in which we can trace its roots back to Nishida Kitarō’s notion of “self-contradictory identity” (矛盾的自己同一 mujunteki jikodōitsu) and Nishitani Keiji’s “non-duality of self and other” (自他不二 jitafuni). According to the first, each of us, as individual bodies, also contains absolute negation within. The latter refers to a mode of being where self and other are one and simultaneously each one remains what it is in itself, probably inspired in Mahāyāna Buddhist logic whereby two different things are neither one nor two and yet both one and two. Given that the identification of the subject with its context and the emphasis on the sameness can entail the risk of suppressing other’s alterity and subordinating the individual to the whole, these views have been regarded as ambivalent. Therefore, the criticism and implications of this standpoint of “contradictory identity” are also examined. However, the assumption here is that due to the ethical import of this standpoint, it could certainly be of interest if applied to social and intercultural relations. (shrink)

As a study of the scholastic sources of Malebranche's thought, this book contains a discovery of considerable importance. Connell has shown that the logical structure of Malebranche's initial demonstration of the theory of vision in God in La recherche de la vérité corresponds to the structure of discussions of angelic knowledge of matter in the Suarezian treatise De Angelis. This correspondence, together with a more general similarity of some philosophical themes, casts welcome light on Malebranche's argument. It also lends support (...) to Connell's further claim that Augustine was not a substantive influence upon the first formulation of the theory of vision in God. It seems to this reviewer that Connell is too direct in his assessment of the substantive influence of scholasticism upon Malebranche's meaning. He maintains that the first version of the theory depends upon a conception of ideas which renders them equivalent to the scholastic universal species, granting ambiguities attributable to Cartesianism. Texts cited in support of this thesis, however, do not contain a single unambiguous instance of the scholastic view as Connell presents it. At the same time, the book as a whole suffers from imbalance in exposition. The guiding principle of Connell's concern with Malebranche is stated only in the General Conclusion, following more than 350 pages of dense argumentation. Connell accuses Malebranche of a specifically modern heresy: ontologism. Consequently, if the pitfalls of his system can be shown to result from the subjection of scholastic insights to Cartesian philosophy, it follows that the philosophical thinking of Augustine is exonerated. It is not so much that Malebranche did not begin as an Augustinian as that Augustine is not responsible for the errors of Malebranche. But what is ontologism? Connell does not explain. He gives only the briefest of definitions in his conclusion. Also, from a few nominal references to it in the text of his exposition, one gathers that it has something to do with "idealism" and "pantheism." This hardly increases the reader's confidence in the general interpretation of the development of Malebranche's thought from the greater predominance of realistic tendencies to an almost unabashed idealism. In any case, it seems unfortunate that Connell's use of his discovery should have taken this rather special turn. Malebranche is not widely read outside the Continent, and yet deserves to be. There are few books about him in English, and this one is large and imposing.--M. S. (shrink)