This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the (...) normativity of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)
Henry E. Allison presents a comprehensive commentary on Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). It differs from most recent commentaries in paying special attention to the structure of the work, the historical context in which it was written, and the views to which Kant was responding. Allison argues that, despite its relative brevity, the Groundwork is the single most important work in modern moral philosophy and that its significance lies mainly in two closely related factors. The (...) first is that it is here that Kant first articulates his revolutionary principle of the autonomy of the will, that is, the paradoxical thesis that moral requirements (duties) are self-imposed and that it is only in virtue of this that they can be unconditionally binding. The second is that for Kant all other moral theories are united by the assumption that the ground of moral requirements must be located in some object of the will (the good) rather than the will itself, which Kant terms heteronomy. Accordingly, what from the standpoint of previous moral theories was seen as a fundamental conflict between various views of the good is reconceived by Kant as a family quarrel between various forms of heteronomy, none of which are capable of accounting for the unconditionally binding nature of morality. Allison goes on to argue that Kant expresses this incapacity by claiming that the various forms of heteronomy unavoidably reduce the categorical to a merely hypothetical imperative. (shrink)
This literature review of professionalism was prepared by San Jose State University graduate student Marianne Allison as a research committee project of the Mass Communication and Society Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The project was prepared under the guidance of Professor Diana Stover Tillinghast. It reviews the literature on two approaches to professionalism in general and of the professionalism of journalists in particular: the ?structural?functionalist approach?; and the ?power approach.?; Traditional and recent discussions of the (...) nature of professionalism in occupational sociology are presented. Studies of the professionalism of journalists both in the United States and cross?culturally are critiqued. The paper suggests several areas of fruitful research, and contains an extensive bibliography. (shrink)
Training in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) is required for many research trainees nationwide, but little is known about its effectiveness. For a preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of a short-term course in RCR, medical students participating in an NIH-funded summer research program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) were surveyed using an instrument developed through focus group discussions. In the summer of 2003, surveys were administered before and after a short-term RCR course, as well as to (...) alumni of the courses given in the summers of 2002 and 2001. Survey responses were analyzed in the areas of knowledge, ethical decision-making skills, attitudes about responsible conduct of research, and frequency of discussions about RCR outside of class. The only statistically significant improvement associated with the course was an increase in knowledge, while there was a non-significant tendency toward improvements in ethical decision-making skills and attitudes about the importance of RCR training. The nominal impact of a short-term training course should not be surprising, but it does raise the possibility that other options for delivering information only, such as an Internet-based tutorial, might be considered as comparable alternatives when longer courses are not possible. (shrink)
In his new book the eminent Kant scholar Henry Allison provides an innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom. The author analyzes the concept and discusses the role it plays in Kant's moral philosophy and psychology. He also considers in full detail the critical literature on the subject from Kant's own time to the present day. In the first part Professor Allison argues that at the center of the Critique of Pure Reason there is the foundation (...) for a coherent general theory of rational agency. The second part employs this account of rational agency as a key to understanding Kant's concept of moral agency and associated moral psychology. The third part focuses on Kant's attempt to ground both moral law and freedom in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of Kant which will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students of Kant's moral theory. (shrink)
Henry Allison is one of the foremost interpreters of the philosophy of Kant. This new volume collects all his recent essays on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. All the essays postdate Allison's two major books on Kant (Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 1983, and Kant's Theory of Freedom, 1990), and together they constitute an attempt to respond to critics and to clarify, develop and apply some of the central theses of those books. Two are published here for the first time. (...) Special features of the collection are: a detailed defence of the author's interpretation of transcendental idealism; a consideration of the Transcendental Deduction and some other recent interpretations thereof; further elaborations of the tensions between various aspects of Kant's conception of freedom and of the complex role of this conception within Kant's moral philosophy. (shrink)
So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the ...
The first two sections of this paper are devoted respectively to the criticisms of my views raised by Stephen Engstrom and Andrews Reath at a symposium on Kant's Theory of Freedom held in Washington D.C. on 28 December 1992 under the auspices of the North American Kant Society. The third section contains my response to the remarks of Marcia Baron at a second symposium in Chicago on 24 April 1993 at the APA Western Division meetings. The fourth section deals with (...) some general criticisms of my treatment of Kant's theory of freedom and its connection with transcendental idealism that have been raised by Karl Ameriks, who was also a participant in the second symposium, in an earlier piece published in Inquiry and by Paul Guyer in a review. The paper as a whole is thus an attempt to reformulate and clarify some of the central claims of my book in light of the initial critical reaction. (shrink)
Abstract Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research and (future) applications raise important ethical issues that need to be addressed to promote societal acceptance and adequate policies. Here we report on a survey we conducted among 145 BCI researchers at the 4 th International BCI conference, which took place in May–June 2010 in Asilomar, California. We assessed respondents’ opinions about a number of topics. First, we investigated preferences for terminology and definitions relating to BCIs. Second, we assessed respondents’ expectations on the marketability of (...) different BCI applications (BCIs for healthy people, BCIs for assistive technology, BCIs-controlled neuroprostheses and BCIs as therapy tools). Third, we investigated opinions about ethical issues related to BCI research for the development of assistive technology: informed consent process with locked-in patients, risk-benefit analyses, team responsibility, consequences of BCI on patients’ and families’ lives, liability and personal identity and interaction with the media. Finally, we asked respondents which issues are urgent in BCI research. Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 1-38 DOI 10.1007/s12152-011-9132-6 Authors Femke Nijboer, Human Media Interaction, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands Jens Clausen, Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany Brendan Z. Allison, Laboratory of Brain-Computer Interfaces, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria Pim Haselager, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands Journal Neuroethics Online ISSN 1874-5504 Print ISSN 1874-5490. (shrink)
Allison, Lyn; Cannold, Leslie It is great to see such a good turnout for this important occasion and I congratulate the Humanist Society again on this award. It really makes a difference to people's lives: when they get the award, when they know about it, when there is publicity for the person concerned. It is an all-round good thing to do and I congratulate you for it.
This paper contains a critical analysis of the interpretation of Kant?s second edition version of the Transcendental Deduction offered by Be ´atrice Longuenesse in her recent book: Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Though agreeing with much of Longuenesse?s analysis of the logical function of judgment, I question the way in which she tends to assign them the objectifying role traditionally given to the categories. More particularly, by way of defending my own interpretation of the Deduction against some of her (...) criticisms, I argue that Longuenesse fails to show how either part of the two-part proof may be plausibly thought to have established the necessity of the categories (as opposed to the logical functions). Finally, I question certain aspects of her ?radical? interpretation of the famous footnote at B160-1, where Kant distinguishes between ?form of intuition? and ?formal intuition? (shrink)
Guyer argues for four major theses. First, in his early, pre-critical discussions of morality, Kant advocated a version of rational egoism, in which freedom, understood naturalistically as a freedom from domination by both one's own inclinations and from other people, rather than happiness, is the fundamental value. From this point of view, the function of the moral law is to prescribe rules best suited to the preservation and maximization of such freedom, just as on the traditional eudaemonistic account it is (...) to prescribe rules for the maximization of happiness. Second, in the Groundwork, Kant abandoned this naturalistic approach and while retaining the same substantive thesis as his early moral philosophy, "namely that freedom is the value that is realized by adherence to the moral law" (Guyer 455), attempted to provide a non-naturalistic (transcendental) grounding for this valuation of freedom. Third, this took the form of a transcendental deduction, closely modeled on that of the first Critique, which was intended to demonstrate that we are in fact (noumenally) free and the moral law is the "causal law" of this freedom. Fourth, this deduction is a disaster, indeed, one of Western philosophy's "most spectacular train wrecks" (Guyer 445). I shall discuss each in turn, devoting the bulk of my attention to the last. (shrink)
This essay examines the main line of argument of Yirmiyahu Yovel's The Adventures of Immanence. Expressing general agreement with Yovel's central thesis that Spinoza's ?immanent revolution? marked an important tuming?point in the history of modernity and profoundly influenced subsequent thought, I none the less take issue with some of the details of the story. In particular, I question his omission of Lessing, his account of the relationship between Spinoza and Kant, and his treatment of Marx. In a final section I (...) present some objections to Yovel's guiding conception of a philosophy of immanence. (shrink)
Kant’s views on enlightenment are best known through his essay, “What is Enlightenment?” This is, however, merely the first of a series of reflections on the subject contained in the Kantian corpus. In what follows, I shall attempt to provide an overview of the Kantian conception of enlightenment. My major concern is to show that Kant had a complex and nuanced conception of enlightenment, one which is closely connected to some of his deepest philosophical commitments, and is as distinct from (...) the views of his contemporaries, including Mendelssohn’s, as his critical philosophy is from the rationalism of Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten. (shrink)
This paper argues that Hume’s central concern in T 1.4.7 is to find a way to rely upon his cognitive faculties in spite of what he has learned about them in the preceding sections of part 4. The trouble is that having identified the understanding with “the general and more establish’d properties of the imagination” (T 1.4.7.6; SBN 267), Hume finds that these properties cannot function apart from other “seemingly trivial” ones, which calls into question the trustworthiness of his cognitive (...) faculties. I claim that Hume justifies this reliance by appealing to what Don Garrett has termed the “title principle,” which enables him to practice “true scepticism” by being diffident of his philosophical doubts as well as of his philosophical conviction” (T 1.4.7.14; SBN 273). (shrink)
This paper defends the thesis of the analyticity of the principle of apperception, as developed in the first part of the B-Deduction, against recent criticisms by Paul Guyer and Patricia Kitchen The first part presents these criticisms, the most important of which being that the analyticity thesis is incompatible with both the avowed goal of which being that the Deduction of establishing the vahdity of the categories and Üie account of apperception in the A-Deduction. The second part argues that Kant's (...) procedure in the B-Deduction of beginning with an abstract analysis of a discursive understanding, independentiy of its relation to the specifically human forms of sensibility, requires him to regard the principle as analytic and that this explains the difference from the A-Deduction. By appealing to the model of a deduction in Kant's moral theory and the two step in one proof structure of the B-Deduction, the third part argues that the analyticity thesis is in fact compatible with the goal of the Deduction. (shrink)
O autor reexamina a crítica de Derrida à fenomenologia de Husserl de forma a mostrar como a sua coerência estrutural emerge não tanto de uma redução a uma doutrina particular, mas antes das exigências de uma concepção unitária, especificamente impostas pelas determinações epistemológicas e metafísicas da presença. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Desconstrução. Derrida. Fenomenologia. Husserl. Presença. Significado. ABSTRACT – The author reexamines Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology, so as to show how its structural coherency arises not so much from the reduction to (...) a particular doctrine, but rather from the demands of a unitary conception, specifically from the demands imposed by the epistemological and metaphysical determinations of presence. KEY WORDS – Deconstruction. Derrida. Husserl. Meaning. Phenomenology. Presence. (shrink)
A new collection of inspiring personal philosophies from another noteworthy group of people This second collection of This I Believe essays gathers seventyfive essayists—ranging from famous to previously unknown—completing the thought that begins the book’s title. With contributors who run the gamut from cellist Yo-Yo Ma to ordinary folks like a diner waitress, an Iraq War veteran, a farmer, a new husband, and many others, This I Believe II , like the first New York Times bestselling collection, showcases moving and (...) irresistible essays. Included are Sister Helen Prejean writing about learning what she truly believes through watching her own actions, singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore writing about a hard-won wisdom based on being generous to others, and Robert Fulghum writing about dancing all the dances for as long as he can. Readers will also find wonderful and surprising essays about forgiveness, personal integrity, and honoring life and change. Here is a welcome, stirring, and provocative communion with the minds and hearts of a diverse, new group of people—whose beliefs and the remarkably varied ways in which they choose to express them reveal the American spirit at its best. (shrink)
"Nearly all the essays are theoretically informed, argumentative, and exceptionally interesting; nearly all try to paint the merits (and demerits) of utilitarianism as a political philosophy in the light of attempted solutions to theoretical problems that are explored in some detail. The result is a searching, thoughtful volume." --Ethics "The Utilitarian Response is unique in the breadth of problems and questions in utilitarian theory covered. It is more suggestive of strategies by which contemporary utilitarianism could be improved than a comprehensive (...) reply to recent objections to utilitarianism. It should be of great interest to scholars in ethical theory and political philosophy. It would also serve well as a text for a graduate level seminar, if accompanied with readings in the area of recent objections to utilitarianism." --Utilitas Utilitarianism is an important component of both popular and academic responses to the problems of ethics and public policy. Over the past two decades, it has lost some ground to rival theories, such as: contractarian, libertarian and natural rights. This book explores the capacity of utilitarianism and the existing challenge of reviving it in political theory. Primary attention is given to questions on the intellectual coherence and moral acceptability of utilitarian responses to practical dilemmas, including health care, punishment, and electoral arrangements. Also examined are the relationships between private ethics and public policy, utility and freedom, utility and democracy, and the role and limitations of states, both locally and internationally. The Utilitarian Response is a broad and contemporary account of utilitarian theory as it exists today. It explores the continuing applicability of utilitarian thought to current practical and interrelated issues of ethics, economics, and politics. An ideal resource for scholars in political philosophy and political theory. (shrink)
In this paper I take issue with Allison's ‘two aspect’ view of Kant's transcendental distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves. Unlike those of Allison's critics, who criticize him, and by implication Kant, based on some form of the ‘two world’ view, I argue that, even Allison's methodological, more moderate interpretation, nevertheless includes an excessive commitment to the role of things-in-themselves in Kant's theoretical philosophy, a commitment which is both unnecessary and incompatible with Kant's text. I offer an alternative (...) interpretation which, in my view, is at once more accurate, and more defensible against the familiar claim that Kant's philosophy is either incompatible with itself or it inevitably leads to idealism. (shrink)
Kant's use of the leading thread of his table of logical forms of judgment to analyze judgments of taste yields more results than Allison's account allows. It reveals in judgments of taste the combination of two judgments: a descriptive judgment about the object, and a normative judgment about the judging subjects. Core arguments of Kant's critique of taste receive new light from this analysis.
In response to Henry Allison?s and Sally Sedwick?s comments on my recent book, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, I explain Kant?s description of the understanding as being essentially a ?capacity to judge?, and his view of the relationship between the categories and the logical functions of judgment. I defend my interpretation of Kant?s argument in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the B edition. I conclude that, in my interpretation, Kant?s notions of the ?a priori? and the (...) ?given? are more complex and flexible than is generally perceived. Nevertheless, Kant maintains a strict distinction between receptivity and spontaneity, the ?passive? and the ?active aspects of our representational capacities. This separates him from his German idealist successors, most notably Fichte and Hegel. Contrary to Sedgwick?s and Allison?s suggestions, I do not think that my interpretation tends to blur this distinction. (shrink)
In his very rich and insightful book, Kant's Theory of Freedom, Henry Allison argues that in the first Critique Kant's reason for rejecting Humean compatibilism in favor of an incompatibilist conception of practical freedom stems, not from a specific concern to ground morality, as many have supposed, but from his general conception of rational agency, which Allison explicates in terms of the idea of practical spontaneity. Practically spontaneous rational agency is subject to imperatives and therefore distinct from Humean (...) agency. But it is not necessarily subject to the categorical imperative and hence is distinct from fully spontaneous (transcendentally free) moral agency. A conception thus emerges of an agent with limited spontaneity, subject to hypothetical but not categorical imperatives. A doubt may be raised, however, as to whether Kant's view can accommodate this conception of limited practical spontaneity. Reflection on Kant's notion of a hypothetical imperative suggests that the idea of limited spontaneity is in danger of either collapsing into the Humean picture or else turning out to be equivalent to the conception of full spontaneity appropriate to moral agency. There is thus reason to suppose that, for Kant, we would not be bound by imperatives at all if we were not bound by the categorical imperative. (shrink)
Kant's attempts to provide a foundation for morality are examined, with particular focus upon the fact of reason proof in the second Critique. The reconstructions proposed by Allison and Korsgaard are analysed in detail. Although analogous in many ways, they ultimately differ in their understanding of the relation between this proof and that presented in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. A synthesis of the two reconstructions is proposed which amounts to combining Korsgaard's awareness of the issue of (...) agent-situatedness, with Allison's emphasis upon the pivotal role of the notion of transcendental freedom. The reconstructed proof relies upon a teleological assumption about human agency, and thus does not provide an unconditional grounding for the moral law. After a brief examination of contemporary approaches to the grounding of a universal morality in the broadly Kantian tradition, the paper concludes with a suggestion as to how the value of freedom can form the core of an adequate response to reason's demand for such a ground. (shrink)
The goal of this paper is to articulate a new solution to Kant’s third antinomy of pure reason, one that establishes the possibility ofincompatibilist freedom—the freedom presupposed by our traditional conceptions of moral responsibility, moral worth, and justice—without relying on the doctrine of transcendental idealism (TI). A discussion of Henry Allison’s “two-aspect” interpretation of Kant’s TI allows me both to criticize one of the best defenses of TI today and to advance my own TI-free solution to the third antinomy (...) by appeal to a thesis of epistemic modesty based on Paul Guyer’s realist interpretation of Kant’s theory of experience. According to this interpretation, the a priori forms of our sensibility and understanding are not forms that the mind imposes on a material whose real properties are unknowable to us but are instead forms that limit or filter the kinds of things we can experience and know. In particular, being causally determined is a real feature of things as they are in themselves, but the necessity and universality of our deterministic claims are relative, restricted to the objects of possible experience. Consequently, though a causally determined event cannot be free, the necessity and universality of determinism does not entail that free events (choices) cannot exist but that they cannot constitute objects of possible experience. After arguing that freedom is possible, I outline an argument for the reality of freedom, based on therequirements of morality. Finally, I argue that my view, though opposed to metaphysical naturalism, is consistent with scientific realism and methodological naturalism. (shrink)
you ought to - you should - become the one you are -, such a command opposes the strictures of Kant’s practical imperatives, offering an assertion that seems to encourage us as what we are. As David B. Allison stresses in his book, Nietzsche’s is a voice that addresses us as a friend would: “like a friend who seems to share your every concern - and your aversions and suspicions as well. Like a true friend, he rarely tells (...) you what you ought to do.”. (shrink)
Henry Allison [1983; cf. 1990, 1996] criticizes and rejects naturalism because the idea of freedom is constitutive of rational spontaneity, which alone enables and entitles us to judge or to act rationally, and only transcendental idealism can justify our acting under the idea of freedom. Allison’s critique of naturalism is unclear because his reasons for claiming that free rational spontaneity requires transcendental idealism are inadequate and because his characterization of Kant’s idealism is ambiguous. Recognizing this reinforces the importance (...) of the question of whether only transcendental idealism “can ground the right to the conceptual space” that we occupy when thinking spontaneously or acting under the idea of freedom. Only with a clear answer to this question can Kant’s idea of freedom provide a basis for assessing today’s naturalist orthodoxy. (shrink)
Introduction: Laughter as an expression of human nature in the Middle Ages and the early modern period: literary, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological reflections -- Judith Hagen. Laughter in Procopius's wars -- Livnat Holtzman. "Does God really laugh?": appropriate and inappropriate descriptions of God in Islamic traditionalist theology -- Daniel F. Pigg. Laughter in Beowulf: ambiguity, ambivalence, and group identity formation -- Mark Burde. The parodia sacra problem and medieval comic studies -- Olga V. Trokhimenko. Women's laughter and gender politics (...) in medieval conduct discourse -- Madelon Köhler-Busch. Pushing decorum: uneasy laughter in Heinrich von Dem Türlîn's Diu crône -- Connie L. Scarborough. Laughter and the comic in a religious text -- John Sewell. The son rebelled and so the father made man alone: ridicule and boundary maintenance in The Nizzahon vetus -- Birgit Wiedl. Laughing at the beast: the judensau: anti-Jewish propaganda and humor from the Middle Ages to the early modern period -- Fabian Alfie. Yes . . . but was it funny? Cecco Angiolieri, Rustico Filippi and Giovanni Boccaccio -- Nicolino Applauso. Curses and laughter in medieval Italian comic poetry -- Feargal Béarra. Tromdhámh guaire: a context for laughter and audience in early modern Ireland -- Jean E. Jost. Humorous transgression in the non-conformist fabliaux: a Bakhtinian analysis of three comic tales -- Gretchen Mieszkowski. Chaucerian comedy: Troilus and Criseyde -- Sarah Gordon. Laughing and eating in the fabliaux -- Christine Bousquet-Labouérie. Laughter and medieval stalls -- Scott L. Taylor. Esoteric humor and the incommensurability of laughter -- Jean N. Goodrich. The function of laughter in The second shepherds' play -- Albrecht Classen. Laughing in late-medieval verse and prose narratives -- Rosa Alvarez perez. The workings of desire: Panurge and the dogs -- Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. Laughing out loud in the Heptaméron: a reassessment of Marguerite de Navarre's ambivalent humor -- Lia B. Ross. You had to be there: the elusive humor of the Sottie -- Kyle Diroberto. Sacred parody in Robert Greene's Groatsworth of wit -- Martha Moffitt Peacock. The comedy of the shrew: theorizing humor in early modern Netherlandish art -- Jessica Tvordi. The comic personas of Milton's Prolusion VI: negotiating masculine identity through self-directed humor -- John Alexander. Ridentum dicere verum (using laughter to speak the truth): laughter and the language of the early modern clown "pickelhering" in German literature of the late seventeenth century (1675-1700) -- Thomas Willard. Andreae's ludibrium: Menippean satire in The chymische hochzeit -- Diane Rudall. The comic power of illusion-allusion -- Allison P. Coudert. Laughing at credulity and superstition in the long eighteenth century. (shrink)
This article notes six advances in recent analytic Kant research: (1) Strawson's interpretation, which, together with work by Bennett, Sellars, and others, brought renewed attention to Kant through its account of space, time, objects, and the Transcendental Deduction and its sharp criticisms of Kant on causality and idealism; (2) the subsequent investigations of Kantian topics ranging from cognitive science and philosophy of science to mathematics; (3) the detailed work, by a number of scholars, on the Transcendental Deduction; (4) the clearer (...) understanding of transcendental idealism sparked by reactions to Allison's epistemic account; (5) the resulting need—prompted also by new studies of the thing in itself—to face up to the old question of the philosophical defensibility of such idealism; and (6) the active engagement with Kant's ethics and political philosophy that derives from Rawls's and others' work. (shrink)
In this article, I investigate actions that the United States took against Costa Rica during the 1980s in order to argue that current discussions about global justice and its foundations are flawed in three ways. First, it misidentifies the parties of global justice as individual citizens. Second, it conceptualizes global justice as exclusively a distributive justice concern and, as a result, it misidentifies what constitutes a global injustice as being the adverse fate of individuals who live in a poor nation. (...) Finally, the current debate provides no guidance in what must be considered to identify the specific obligations one nation may have to another nation. Given these three problems, I maintain that we conceptualize global injustice as an issue of social justice rather than one exclusively of distributive justice. This will require identifying nations as the parties to global justice, at least in certain cases, and realizing that our goal is to remedy oppressive global structures of power. Utilizing the social justice I propose will put us on the road toward achieving justice across the Americas. (shrink)
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) is responsible for the Code of Professional Conduct that governs the actions of CPAs. In 1988, the Code was revised by the AICPA, but a number of issues still remain unresolved or confounded by the new Code. These issues are examined in light of the profession''s stated commitment to the public good, a commitment that is discussed at length in the new Code.Specifically, this paper reviews the following issues: (1) client confidentiality and (...) whistleblowing, (2) limited liability, and (3) auditor independence. We argue that, in each of these areas, the AICPA promotes a position that is potentially harmful to the public good. (shrink)
Contemporary feminist theory is at an impasse: the project of reformulating concepts of self and social identity is thwarted by an association between identity and oppression and victimhood. In Sacrificial Logics, Allison Weir proposes a way out of this impasse through a concept of identity which depends on accepting difference. Weir argues that the equation of identity with repression and domination links "relational" feminists like Nancy Chodorow, who equate self-identity with the repression of connection to others, and poststructuralist feminists (...) like Judith Butler, who view any identity as a repression of nonidentity and difference. Through readings of Chodorow, Butler, Jessica Benjamin, Luce Irigaray, Jacqueline Rose and Julia Kristeva, Weir analyzes the relation of theories of self-identity to theories of women's identity, social identity, the identity of meaning in language and feminist solidarity. Drawing particularly on the work of Julia Kristeva, she argues for a reformulation of self-identity as a capacity to participate in a social world, and sketches a model of a self-identity which depends on a capacity to accept nonidentity, difference and connections to others. (shrink)
In her book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood analyzes the practices of the women in the mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt. Mahmood argues that in order to recognize the participants as agents, we need to question the assumption that agency entails resistance to norms; moreover, we need to question the feminist allegiance to an unquestioned ideal of freedom. In this paper, I argue that rather than giving up the ideal of freedom, we can (...) explore the possibility that there are different conceptions of freedom, and that the agency of the women in the mosque movement can be understood through a conception of freedom as a practice of connection, or belonging. I develop this alternative paradigm through discussions of four conceptions of freedom: Foucault's theory of agency as self-creation, positive freedom, communitarian freedom, and freedom as resistance. (shrink)
This work focuses on Latin Judaica and Biblical interpretation with a primary emphasis on texts that were found in the library of Archbishop Narcissus Marsh of Dublin. This remarkable collection of Latin Judaica, Polyglot Bibles, and other works sheds light on the way in which the Protestant Reformation dealt both with Jews, and the Bible, the Jewish Kabbalah and religious toleration or intolerance. The articles contained herein will be of especial interest to historians of religion and philosophy, and those (...) dealing with Jewish-Christian relations and the manner in which Biblical interpretation was changed as a result of seventeenth-century influences. The articles also weave a new approach to the broad history of religious toleration. Philosophers, political thinkers, religious clerics, and budding anthropologists look at Judaism, Christianity, Kabbalah, and the Bible under a new and vastly more modern lens. (shrink)
Although we find Gangestad & Simpson's argument intriguing, we question some of its underlying assumptions, including: (1) that fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is consistently heritable; (2) that symmetry is driving the effects; (3) that use of parametric tests with FA is appropriate; and (4) that a short-term mating strategy produces more offspring than a long-term strategy.
The current U.S. health care system, with both rising costs and demands, is unsustainable. The combination of a sense of individual entitlement to health care and limited acceptance of individual responsibility with respect to personal health has contributed to a system which overspends and underperforms. This sense of entitlement has its roots in a perceived right to health care. Beginning with the so-called moral right to health care (all life is sacred), the issue of who provides health care has evolved (...) as individual rights have trumped societal rights. The concept of government providing some level of health care ranges from limited government intervention, a ‘negative right to health care’ (e.g., prevention of a socially-caused, preventable health hazard), to various forms of a ‘positive right to health care’. The latter ranges from a decent minimum level of care to the best possible health care with access for all. We clarify the concept of legal rights as an entitlement to health care and present distributive and social justice counter arguments to present health care as a privilege that can be provided/earned/altered/revoked by governments. We propose that unlike a ‘right’, which is unconditional, a ‘privilege’ has limitations. Going forward, expectations about what will be made available should be lowered while taking personal responsibility for one’s health must for elevated. To have access to health care in the future will mean some loss of personal rights (e.g., unhealthy behaviors) and an increase in personal responsibility for gaining or maintaining one’s health. (shrink)
Abstract Private security contractors are just the tip of an outsourcing iceberg. Across the three Ds of defense, diplomacy, and development, American foreign policy has been privatized. The Obama administration inherited a government that had been hollowed out to an unprecedented extent, and in many realms it had and has no choice but to depend on contractors to conduct what used to be state business. This essay examines the reasons for and unintended negative consequences of this outsourcing of American power. (...) It argues that turning the clock back and returning everything to in-house assignments is both undesirable and impossible. Instead, government must pursue contracting in ways that do not undermine the public interest. It can do this by identifying the things that should never be outsourced and ensuring that the letter and spirit of the Federal Funding Transparency and Accountability Act is upheld. Greater transparency in contractor?government relations will foster private security contractor compliance with ethical norms while bolstering our capacity for self-government. Transparency is thus both an end in itself and a means to sustainable democratic deliberation. While tension can exist between national security and open government, that tension is often overestimated. (shrink)
I point out some unclarities in Allison's interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory, specifically in his account of the free play of the faculties. I argue that there is a tension between Allison's commitment to the intentionality of the pleasure involved in a judgment of beauty, and his view that the pleasure is distinct from the judgment, and I claim that the tension should be resolved by rejecting the latter view. I conclude by addressing Allison's objection that my (...) own view fails to accommodate judgments of non-beauty or ugliness. (shrink)
HenryAllison's “Incorporation Thesis” has played an important role in recent discussions of Kantian ethics. By focussing on Kant's claim that “a drive [Triebfeder] can determine the will to an action only so far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim,” (Rel 19, translation slightly modified) Allison has successfully argued against Kant's critics that desire-based non-moral action can be free action. His work has thus opened the door for a wide range of discussions which integrate (...) feeling into moral action more deeply than had previously been considered “Kantian”. (shrink)
Can Kant's theory of freedom be defended in contemporary ?incompatibilist? terms, as Henry Allison believes, or is it vulnerable to Hegelian criticisms of the ?compatibilist? sort that Allen Wood presents? I argue that the answer to both of these questions is negative, and that there is a third option, namely that Kant's real theory of freedom is not as well off as Allison contends, nor as weak as Wood claims. Allison tries to save Kant's theory of freedom (...) from both what he takes to be traditional and improper interpretations ? notably including Hegel's and Wood's ? of what that theory means, as well as from traditional and improper objections to its defensibility. I argue in part with Wood (and Hegel) against Allison on the issue of the meaning of Kant's theory, and in part with Allison against Wood (and Hegel) on the issue of the defensibility of Kant's theory. (shrink)
The Century of Taste offers an exposition and critical account of the central figures in the early development of the modern philosophy of art. Dickie traces the modern theory of taste from its first formulation by Francis Hutcheson, to blind alleys followed by Alexander Gerard and Archibald Allison, its refinement and complete expression by Hume, and finally to its decline in the hands of Kant. In a clear and straightforward style, Dickie offers sympathetic discussions of the theoretical aims of (...) these philosophers, but does not shy from controversy--pointing out, for instance, the obscurities and inconsistencies in Kant's aesthetic writings, and arguing that they have been overrated. (shrink)
Maxims play a crucial role in Kant's ethical philosophy, but there is significant disagreement about what maxims are. In this two-part essay, I survey eight different views of Kantian maxims, presenting their strengths, and their weaknesses. Part I: Established Approaches, begins with Rüdiger Bubner's view that Kant took maxims to be what ordinary people of today take them to be, namely pithily expressed precepts of morality or prudence. Next comes the position, most associated with Rüdiger Bittner and Otfried Höffe, that (...) maxims are Lebensregeln, or 'life-rules'– quite general rules for how to conduct oneself based on equally general outlooks on how the world is. These first two interpretations make sense of Kant's claim, made in his anthropological and pedagogical writings, that we have to learn how to act on maxims, but they become less plausible in light of Kant's probable view that people always act on maxims – after all, how can people learn how to act on something they always act on anyway? The next two views, each advanced, at different times, by Onora O'Neill, make better sense of the fact that people always act on maxims, for they hold that maxims are intentions – either specific intentions, such as 'to open the door', or general intentions, such as 'to make guests feel welcome'– and it is perfectly sensible to claim that people always act on intentions. However, they face the same problem as the two previous views, which is that if people always act on maxims, what sense does it make to say they also have to learn how to act on them? Henry Allison, the main representative of the fifth view, claims, on the basis of Kant's doctrine of the 'highest maxim', that maxims are principles organized hierarchically, such that an agent endorses one maxim because she endorses a more general maxim. Unfortunately for Allison, there is little direct textual support for his claim that maxims are organized hierarchically. (shrink)
I offer a critical reconstruction of Kant's thesis that aesthetic judgement is founded on the principle of the purposiveness of nature. This has been taken as equivalent to the claim that aesthetics is directly linked to the systematicity of nature in its empirical laws. I take issue both with Henry Allison, who seeks to marginalize this claim, and with Avner Baz, who highlights it in order to argue that Kant's aesthetics are merely instrumental for his epistemology. My solution is (...) that aesthetic judgement operates as an exemplary presentation of our general ability to schematise an intuition with a concept at the empirical level. I suggest that this counts as an empirical schematism. Although aesthetic judgement is not based on empirical systematicity, it can nevertheless offer indirect support for the latter in so far as it is a particular revelation of purposiveness in general. (shrink)
In this paper I argue that, on Kant's view, the work of genius serves as a sensible exhibition of the Idea of the highest good. In other words, the work of genius serves as a special sign that the world is hospitable to our moral ends and that the realization of our moral vocation in such a world may indeed be possible. In the first part of the paper, I demonstrate that the purpose of the highest good is not to (...) strengthen our motivation to accept the moral law as binding for us but, rather, to strengthen our motivation to persist in our already existent moral dispositions. In the second part, I show that the works of genius exhibit the Idea of the highest good and, consequently, strengthen our hope in its realization. Drawing on the results of the second part, the third part of the paper demonstrates that beauty, of both art and nature, symbolizes morality in a more substantive sense than that suggested by Henry Allison's “formalistic” interpretation. Since, on my view, fine art in Kant serves as a sensible representation of an undetermined conceptual content, or the Idea of the highest good, the fourth part of the paper addresses the vexed question of whether Kant's account of fine art already anticipates the cognitive role later attributed to it by the German Idealists. (shrink)
Although both Kant and Wittgenstein made claims about the "unknowability" of cognitive subjects, the current practice of assimilating their positions is mistaken. I argue that Allison's attempt to understand the Kantian self through the early Wittgenstein and McDowell's linking of Kant and the later Wittgenstein distort rather than illuminate. Against McDowell, I argue further that the Critique's analysis of the necessary conditions for cognition produces an account of the sources of epistemic normativity that is importantly different from McDowell's own (...) account in terms of a `second nature' created through `Bildung'. Finally, I argue that Kant's epistemic analyses also lead to a model of the cognitive self that answers two contemporary questions: why should we refer to selves at all? in what dies the unity of a subject of thought consist? (shrink)
Against influential views to the contrary, notably formulated in Henry Allison's 'Christianity and Nonsense', it is argued that Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript is not in itself, as a whole or in any part, an elaborate joke. The work contains a serious though negative argument designed to locate the place of faith in relation to reason. Given that the text itself makes claims on our reason in this way but that its pseudonymous author is a self-styled humorist, the question of (...) where the work's humour lies needs to be freshly confronted. After humour has been distinguished from comedy (as a point of view from which unconscious comedy in the enactment of life-views becomes visible), and both from absurdity, it is concluded that a fundamental aim of Postscript, once the negative argument has been given, is to cast light self-referentially on the comedy of humour itself. Finally, in asking what bearing Postscript's humour can have on whatever philosophy means to us today, two main respects (and areas) are indicated in which current philosophical investigation may be seen to be potentially comic from a (broadened and non-parochial) Postscriptian perspective. (shrink)
Many scholars, in view of the close link that he draws between morality and freedom, argue that Kant does not think that there are free choices between nonmoral ends. On this view, Kant only posits afreedom to resist our desires and act morally. We are still responsible for immoral choices because we always have the power to act morally. Henry Allison has opposed this reading by arguing that Kant grounds a notion of nonmoral freedom in the Incorporation Thesis. In (...) this paper, I criticize Allison’s argument and then try to replace it with an alternative that grounds nonmoral freedom in morality. (shrink)
: This paper discusses the function and scope of incompatibilist or transcendental freedom in Kant's moral philosophy. The prevailing view among scholars, most notably Allison, is that the function of transcendental freedom is to enable us to articulate a first-person conception of ourselves as rational agents involved in deliberation and choice. Thus, the scope of transcendental freedom is rational agency in general. In order to perform this function, freedom has to be merely conceivable. Pace Allison, I argue that (...) our first-person conception is neutral with respect to causal determinism, and that the function of transcendental freedom is to provide the metaphysical conditions of the possibility of genuine moral responsibility and perfect justice, and to get rid of moral luck. In order to perform this function, transcendental freedom has to be not just conceivable, but metaphysically real. My view suggests that we only have reason to attribute freedom to ourselves in situations in which we are aware that the moral law commands us categorically. We do not have a similar reason to believe we are free in purely prudential choices. Thus, the scope of transcendental freedom is not rational agency in general, but only moral agency. (shrink)
Recently, Kenneth Westphal has presented a highly interesting and innovative reading of Kant's critical philosophy.2 This reading continues a tradition of Kantscholarship of which, e.g., Paul Guyer's work is representative, and in which the antiidealistic potential of Kant's critical philosophy is pitted against its idealistic selfunderstanding. Much of the work in this tradition leaves matters at observing the tensions this introduces in Kant's work. But Westphal's proposed interpretation goes farther. Its attractiveness derives for the most part from the promise that (...) it permits an internal critique of Kant's transcendental idealism (TI), that is, a critique that is based on the very resources of Kantian transcendental philosophy.3 In contrast to these resources, which currently seem to go through a sort of revival in an enormous array of fields, TI is notorious for dismaying even sympathetic interpreters. How attractive and needed such an internal critique of TI would be becomes all the more patent when we place such a promise in the context of some of the contemporary discussions about TI after Allison's famous defense of it. Before directly engaging with Westphal's interpretation, I would therefore like to quickly sketch on what background it acquires its force (I). After characterizing the main features of Westphal's view (II), and supporting it in more detail by an account of Kant's theory of cognitive significance (III), I then want to review the extent of its success to present Kant as issuing an anti-skeptical argument (IV.1), or semantic views that are incompatible with TI (IV.2), or a 'proof of not merely empirical realism' (IV.3). I agree that purely idealist readings of Kant are mistaken. Westphal's.. (shrink)
Henry Allison and Paul Guyer have recently offered interpretations of Kant's argument in _Groundwork III_. These interpretations share this premise: the argument moves from a non-moral, theoretical premise to a moral conclusion, and the failure of the argument is a failure to make this jump from the non-moral to the moral. This characterization both of the nature of the argument and its failure is flawed. Consider instead the possibility that in _Groundwork III_, Kant is struggling toward something rather different (...) from this, not trying to pull the moral rabbit out of the theoretical hat, but instead seeking a proto-phenomenological grounding of morality: a grounding that begins from first personal felt experiences that already possess moral content, and proceeds to its further practical claims via attentive reflection on these felt experiences. This paper brings this assumption to our reading of _Groundwork III_, showing that in doing so we acquire a deeper appreciation both of the argument, and the reasons it fails. Kant's argument is practical throughout. And the failure of the argument is the failure of Kant's nascent efforts to provide a new, phenomenological method for the grounding of practical philosophy. (shrink)
Part I raises some questions concerning the extent of our freedom on the view that Henry Allison's Kant's Theory of Freedom attributes to Kant, and the possibility, on that view, of weakness of will. Allison is correct to attribute to Kant the ?Incorporation Thesis?: one is never compelled to do x just because one has a desire (even a very intense desire) to do x; a desire moves one to action only if one allows it to. But while (...) the attribution seems correct, there is a puzzle: how, given the Incorporation Thesis, is weakness of will, or ?frailty?, possible? Part II considers Kant's claim in The Doctrine of Virtue that we have an indirect duty to cultivate our sympathetic feelings. Allison's interpretation is unsatisfactory because it fails to steer clear of the ?impurity? problem: the interpretation seems to foist on Kant an endorsement of impurity, i.e. the seeking out of nonmoral reasons to induce one to do one's duty. To seek out such reasons is to cultivate an impure will, something Kant warns against. A different interpretation is offered. (shrink)
This paper surveys some themes of Allison's Kant's Theory of Freedom, and then raises a problem for his presentation of Kant's Reciprocity Thesis. Allison argues that a transcendentally free agent is bound to the moral law as follows. Rational agents fall under a justification requirement, and when transcendental freedom is added to the concept of rational agency, the justification requirement extends to the choice of fundamental maxims. Since facts about one's nature cannot justify the adoption of fundamental maxims, (...) all that remains are considerations that anyone can recognize as valid. Thus a transcendentally free agent must conform to unconditional laws. The problem is that it is unclear how a transcendentally free agent can make a reasoned choice of fundamental principles; but if it can, why can't it choose the Principle of Happiness? I suggest that a stronger version of this argument results from adopting a richer notion of a transcendentally free agent as an autonomous sovereign will with an interest in expressing its sovereignty. (shrink)
Kant held that “an incentive can determine the will [Willkür] to action only so far as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim”,2 a view dubbed the “Incorporation Thesis” by Henry Allison (hereafter, “IT”).3 Although many see IT as basic to Kant’s views on agency, it also seems irreconcilable with the possibility of a kind of weakness, the kind exhibited by a person who acts on incentives that run contrary to principles she holds dear.4 The problem is this: (...) According to IT, if an incentive determines the will of the weak person when she acts contrary to her principles, then it must be the case that she incorporated that incentive into her maxim. But that in turn means that she has made it her principle to act on the wayward incentive, and so is not, after all, exhibiting weakness in failing to follow her own principles, but at best simply dropping one principle in favor of another.5 So either the weak person does not incorporate the wayward incentive into her maxim and IT is false, or she does incorporate it and weakness is impossible. (shrink)
This essay seeks to ascertain the philosophical status of revelation in Kant's critical philosophy so as to come to a better understanding of the use of Scripture in his religious writings, especially Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone . In doing so it remains faithful to Kant's hermeneutic strictures according to which the bible must be expounded according to morality, in the sense of the categorical imperative, and its attendant pure practical postulates. Taking as clues Kant's repeated insistence in (...) several critical works that revelation must function symbolically, and the Religion 's most detailed discussions of the nature of biblical language, I argue for the account of the philosophical status of Scripture's narrative content being supplied in the 3 rd Critique's discussion of analogical schematism, and that Kant thus regards Scripture as possessing an aesthetic content. I follow Henry E. Allison's work in interpreting Kant's cryptic account of analogy in terms of his theory of aesthetic ideas, and show how such a connection amply illuminates Kant's use of Scripture. Finally, I ask how understanding revelation in terms of aesthetic ideas complies with Kant's demands for the philosophical irreducibility of rational morality, and demonstrate how Kant remains strictly consistent on this score whilst also guaranteeing Scripture a properly aesthetic content. (shrink)
In part I I reply to Seymour Feldman's criticism of volume 1 of The Marrano of Reason. I try to show that Professor Feldman misreads me, first, by overlooking the transformation of Spinoza's Marrano traits from the world of religion to the world of reason; second, by failing to recognize the diversity of Marrano responses as part of my own thesis; and thirdly, by paying no heed to the mental (or, phenomenological) structures and analysis upon which a good deal of (...) my argument relies. Since many of Feldman's particular points hinge upon the first two points, I need not address each item separately. This leaves a few smaller points. I also restate the methodological boundaries of my ?Marrano? thesis, what the book does and does not do. In parts II and III I respond to criticisms on volume 2 of The Adventures of Immanence from Henry Allison and Richard Schacht. I admit the book calls for a chapter on Lessing and the Pantheismusstreit, and also on existentialists like Sartre (and Heidegger too), though not Kierkegaard. I defend, against Allison, my not self?evident decision to include Kant, whose position I characterize as ?immanent humanism?. Although Kant opposed reason to nature, his revolution made the human mind, rather than a transcendent God, the source of objectivity in knowledge, morality in action, legitimacy in politics, and even sanctity in religion. I also defend my reconstruction of Marx's immanentist ontology. I further clarify two crucial distinctions: a philosophy of immanence is not necessarily the same as ?Spinozism?, and is not necessarily critical. Hence my protagonists need not be strict Spinozists, or critical philosophers, to figure in the ?adventures of immanence?. My debate with Schacht concerns the question whether Nietzsche and Marx saw the immanent world as divine (which I deny); the place of pantheism in these thinkers (in Nietzsche I see it as a temptation which amor fati has to overcome); and whether Hegel's discovery of the role of the social world in mediating knowledge depended on his metaphysical anthropomorphism (viewing the immanent domain as subject and Spirit, and assigning the human race a privileged ontological ? and theological ? role in it: I deny that dependence). Finally, in the reply to both Allison and Schacht I rephrase my criticism of Nietzsche's ?cult of transitoriness and explain my preference for ?tentative rationality"? (shrink)
In Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Henry Allison argues that Kant’s theoretical treatment of the self presents both an incoherent “official view” and a coherent “alternative view.” In this paper, I argue that Kant’s genuine position on the self can be reconstructed as a coherent unity by examining the flaws in Allison’s analysis. It is shown that Allison’s objections to Kant’s official view are based on unwarranted metaphysical assumptions and unjustified conceptual identifications. Allison’s own dual-aspect view of the (...) transcendental distinction between phenomena and noumena is used to correct these misconceptions. Thus, the official view as described by Allison is not Kant’s genuine position. Rather, it is shown that Kant treats the noumenal self as the ground or support of the activity of thinking and the subject of apperception, and that this grounding function is essential to Kant’s view but overlooked by Allison’s analysis. (shrink)
The idea that noumena or things in themselves causally affect our sensibility, and thus provide us with sensations, has been rejected on two basic grounds: It is unintelligible because distinguishes between appearance and reality in such a way that things cannot in principle appear as they really are, and it requires applying the concept of causality trans-phenomenally, contra Kant’s Schematism. I argue that noumenal causality is intelligible and is required out of fidelity to Kant’s texts and doctrines. Kant’s theory of (...) meaning and his transcendental reflection on sensibility show how Kant legitimately can speak about, and determine that, our passive sensibility must be causally affected by noumena. Kant’s analysis of agency shows that Kant’s practical philosophy requires noumenal causality, both from a first- and from a third-person perspective. These points ground my criticisms of Buchdahl and Allison’s view of affection, and Strawson and Sandberg’s view of meaning. (shrink)
In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience. Occasionally, thoughtful people familiar with both Walt Whitman and philosophical pragmatism will remark on their affinity.1 Some have even argued, correctly, that Whitman influenced American pragmatism, especially the writings of William James and to a lesser extent John Dewey.2 For instance, Raphael C. Allison (2002) (...) insightfully remarks: “Just as for James, for Dewey it is the communicability of Whitman’s art that makes it significant.”3 He then cites some of the best passages in Dewey’s entire corpus to warrant his .. (shrink)
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant introduced both transcendental idealism and transcendental arguments into philosophy. Transcendental arguments in general aim to establish conditions necessary for our having self-conscious experience at all. Transcendental idealism holds that such conditions do not hold independently of human subjects; those conditions obtain or are satisfied because they are generated or fulfilled by the structure or functioning of the subject’s cognitive capacities. Is transcendental idealism the only possible explanation of such conditions? I pursue this question (...) by exploring a widely neglected issue, the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition. I argue the following: (1) This issue remains vital to the second edition of the Critique, even though many passages on the topic were omitted from that edition. (2) Kant’s link between transcendental idealism and transcendental arguments is substantive, not methodological. (3) Kant’s views on transcendental affinity show that there are non-subjective, transcendental material conditions for the possibility of unified self-conscious experience. (4) These conditions and Kant’s arguments for them directly undermine Kant’s own arguments for transcendental idealism. This criticism of Kant’s arguments for transcendental idealism is entirely internal to the first Critique. (5) These points reveal some serious flaws in Henry Allison’s defense of Kant’s idealism. (6) Realists, naturalists, and pragmatists have much to learn and to borrow from Kant’s transcendental analysis of the conditions of unified self-conscious experience. (shrink)
Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, Sodom and Gomorrah represent locales in which threats to national formation are couched in sexual terms. The biblical narrative insists on a particular social invisibility for those sexual activities not blessed by the bonds of matrimony. Reclaiming Sodom surveys a number of institutions that have had an interest in perpetuating these views: the police, the state, the church and the law. The collection ranges through biblical scholarship, an investigation of the Founding Fathers' beliefs, the legal mobilization (...) towards the category of sodomy in 18th and 19th century England, and the US Supreme Court's 1986 Bowers vs. Hardwick decision. Analysis is provided of the ways in which the Judeo-Christian tradition has shaped anthropological accounts of the same-sex practices of non-Western people, as well as essays on how colonial gestures have marked lesbian identity in the Carribean, and derformed narratives about the racial geography of AIDS. Reclaiming Sodom explores alternatives to the force of the Sodomitic biblical narrative in Islamic, non-western, and western traditions, and discusses the ways in which sodomy calls into question normative definitions of sexuality and gender. The collection pursues the "pleasures and dangers" of these alternatives, and takes on Proust's refusal to imagine a social movement founded on the "stigma" of Sodom. The collection examines the relations between sex/gender identities and sexual acts in important and provocative ways, and argues for the political use and usefulness of both Sodom and sodomy. Reclaiming Sodom makes an important and controversial contribution to the literature on sexuality and gender, as well as the nature of sex in our culture. Contributors: Dorothy Allison, Robert Alter, Neil Bartlett, Leo Bersani, Gerald Creed, Marc Daniel, Lee Edelman, Janet E. Halley, Jonathan Ned Katz, Pierre Klossowski, Rocky O'Donovan, Guy Hocquenghem, Cindy Patton, Marquis de Sade, David Shannon, Makeda Silver, Jonathan Goldberg. (shrink)
Wall, G. Locke's attack on innate knowledge.--Harris, J. Leibniz and Locke on innate ideas.--Greenlee, D. Locke's idea of idea.--Aspelin, G. Idea and perception in Locke's essay.--Greenlee, D. Idea and object in the essay.--Mathews, H. E. Locke, Malebranche and the representative theory.--Alexander, P. Boyle and Locke on primary and secondary qualities.--Ayers, M. R. The ideas of power and substance in Locke's philosophy.--Allison, H. E. Locke's theory of personal identity.--Kretzmann, N. The main thesis of Locke's semantic theory.--Woozley, A. D. Some remarks (...) on Locke's account of knowledge.--Laudan, L. The nature and sources of Locke's views on hypotheses. (shrink)
Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy: Series Editors, Karl Ameriks and Desmond M. Clarke. Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies . Translated and edited by John Cottingham. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xlvi + 120. 25., 7.95 pb. ISBN 0-521-55252-4 (hb.). ISBN 0-521-55818-2 (pb.). Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality with A Treatise of Freewill . Edited by Sarah Hutton. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxxvi + 218. (...) 37.50 hb., 13.95 pb., ISBN 0-521-47362-4 (hb.). ISBN 0-521-47918-5 (pb.). Anne Conway: The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy . Translated and edited by Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxxix + 73. 35.00 hb., 12.95 pb. ISBN 0-521-47335-7 (hb.). ISBN 0-521-47904-5 (pb.). Julien Offray de La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings . Translated and edited by Ann Thomson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxx + 179. 35.00 (hb.), 12.95. ISBN 0-521-47258-X (hb.). ISBN 0-521-47849-9 (pb.). (shrink)
A valuable intervention in Kristevan scholarship and a significant and exciting contribution in its own right to post-structuralist discussions of ethical and political agency and practice. Contributors: Judith Butler, Tina Chanter, Marilyn Edelstein, Jean Graybeal, Suzanne Guerlac, Alice Jardine, Lisa Lowe, Noelle McAfee, Norma Claire Moruzzi, Kelly Oliver, Tilottma Rajan, Jacqueline Rose, Allison Weir, Mary Bittner Wiseman, Ewa Ziarek.
Hegel famously argued that Kantian Moralität is an empty formalism. This article offers a defense of Kant’s formalism and suggests that it is crucial to Hegel’s own idealism. My defense, however, depends on reading Kantian morality non-morally, as a theory of normative authority. Through a reading of the Grundlegung and Religion, the article delineates Kant’s hyperbolic formalism—the insistence on giving an account of the form of rational agency by isolating willing from all content. The article accordingly assesses Kant’s understanding of (...) autonomy as a matter of institution-subjection. It also critically engages Henry Allison’s groundbreaking work on Kant. Hegel follows Kant in arguing that determinacy is a matter of institution-subjection, and in the Logic provides a radically formalist justification of the role of normative authority in determinacy. Unlike Kant, who articulates institution-subjection as a matter of an isolated subject, Hegel shows that institution-subjection is a matter of social practices. (shrink)
The search for God is dictated not from without but from a profound sense of one's own moral being and worthiness to be happy. The core of Immanuel Kant's argument remains relevant to the experience of ordinary men and women. He wished to strengthen, not undermine, belief in God and in the spiritual nature of humankind. This 1763 essay is imporrtant in understanding the development of Kant's thought. It exposed the flaw in the Cartesian argument that the existence of a (...) perfect being could be deduced from an idea or concept of such. Similarly, Kant saw the problem inherent in the Leibnizian view of a philosophical system modeled on mathematics: a philosopher who, like a mathematician, began with an arbitrary definition remained trapped in a circle of words. In The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God , Kant diverged from the familiar forms of ontological argument. The result was a brilliant approach to divine being that anticipated his mature Critique of Pure Reason. With this Bison Book edition, The One Possible Basis appears in paperback for the first time. Gordon Treash's English translation, the only modern one, faces pages containing the original German. Treash, who is a professor of philosophy at Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, edited, with Paul A. Bogaard, Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc . Also available as a Bison Book is Kant's last major essay, The Conflict of the Faculties (1992). (shrink)
Charles Taylor and Michel Foucault offer two very different descriptions and analyses of modern identities. While it can be argued that Taylor and Foucault are thematizing two very different aspects of identity — Taylor is focusing on first-person, subjective, affirmed identity, and Foucault is focusing on third-person, or ascribed, category identity — in practice, these two are very much intertwined. I argue that attention to identities of race, gender, class and sexual orientation demands that we combine a Foucauldian power analysis (...) with a Taylorean understanding of authenticity. Taking Nancy Fraser's and Linda Gordon's example of the `single black mother on welfare' as the `icon of dependency' in America and Charles Taylor's example of the `householder' who understands himself in relation to an ideal of independence, I show that neither individual can develop either self-knowledge or freedom without engaging in a quest for authenticity that involves both analysis of relations of power and identification with resistant identities. This requires moving beyond both Taylor and Foucault to an understanding of identity in terms of critical relations with defining communities. Key Words: authenticity • critique • Michel Foucault • freedom • identity • meaning • power • self-knowledge • social being • Charles Taylor. (shrink)
In this paper, Weir reconsiders identity politics and their relation to feminist solidarity. She argues that the dimension of identity as “identification-with” has been the liberatory dimension of identity politics, and that this dimension has been overshadowed and displaced by a focus on identity as category. Weir addresses critiques of identification as a ground of solidarity, and sketches a model of identity and identity politics based not in sameness, but in transformative historical process.
Recent research has yielded an explosion of literature that establishes a strong connection between emotional and cognitive processes. Most notably, Antonio Damasio draws an intimate connection between emotion and cognition in practical decision making. Damasio presents a "somatic marker" hypothesis which explains how emotions are biologically indispensable to decisions. His research on patients with frontal lobe damage indicates that feelings normally accompany response options and operate as a biasing device to dictate choice. What Damasio's hypothesis lacks is a theoretical model (...) of decision making which can advance the conceptual connection between emotional and cognitive decision making processes. In this paper we combine Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis with the coherence theory of decision put forward by Thagard and Millgram. The juxtaposition of Damasio's hypothesis with a cognitive theory of decision making leads to a new and better theory of emotional decisions. (shrink)
We contend that empathy is best viewed as a kind of analogical thinking of the sort described in the multiconstraint theory of analogy proposed by Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard (1995). Our account of empathy reveals the Theory-theory/Simulation theory debate to be based on a false assumption and formulated in terms too simple to capture the nature of mental state ascription. Empathy is always simulation, but may simultaneously include theory-application. By properly specifying the analogical processes of empathy and their constraints, (...) we are able to show how the amount of theory needed to empathize is determined. (shrink)
The U.S. Supreme Court's majorityopinion in Vacco v. Quill assumes thatthe principle of double effect explains thepermissibility of hastening death in thecontext of ordinary palliative care and inextraordinary cases in which painkilling drugshave failed to relieve especially intractablesuffering and terminal sedation has beenadopted as a last resort. The traditionaldoctrine of double effect, understood asproviding a prohibition on instrumental harmingas opposed to incidental harming or harming asa side effect, must be distinguished from otherways in which the claim that a result is (...) notintended might be offered as part of ajustification for it. Although double effectmight appropriately be invoked as a constrainton ordinary palliative care, it is not clearthat it can be coherently extended to justifysuch practices as terminal sedation. A betterapproach would reconsider double effect'straditional prohibition on hastening death as ameans to relieve suffering in the context ofacute palliative care. (shrink)
Making decisions with an, often significant, element of risk seems to be an integral part of many of the projects of the diverse profession of engineering. Whether it be decisions about the design of products, manufacturing processes, public works, or developing technological solutions to environmental, social and global problems, risk taking seems inherent to the profession. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the topic and specifically to how our understanding of engineering as a distinctive profession might affect how (...) we should make decisions under risk. This paper seeks to remedy this, firstly by offering a nuanced account of risk and then by considering how specific claims about our understanding of engineering as a social profession, with corresponding social values and obligations, should inform how we make decisions about risk in this context. (shrink)
Drawing on Iris Marion Young’s essay, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” Weir argues for an alternative ideal of home that involves: (1) the risk of connection, and of sustaining relationship through conflict; (2) relational identities, constituted through both relations of power and relations of mutuality, love, and flourishing; (3) relational autonomy: freedom as the capacity to be in relationships one desires, and freedom as expansion of self in relationship; and (4) connection to past and future, through reinterpretive (...) preservation and transformative identification. (shrink)
