New Tenth Anniversary edition of this classic text with a new preface by the author, compares myths about meat-eating with myths about manliness, and seeks to ...

By examining the idea found in the works of several contemporary philosophers that the multiplicity of worlds is no longer merely possible – as it was for Leibniz – but actually determines our experience of reality, the article proposes an understanding of worlds as transcendental structures that frame the ontological multiplicity. The article argues that such a proliferation of actual worlds implies that the concept of world should be seen today as a category that belongs to the order of fiction, (...) making the world-building devices of literature relevant for understanding the contemporary experience of reality. The first part examines the conceptions of multiple worlds of Leibniz, Deleuze, and Badiou through the structural differences and similarities between possible and fictional worlds. While Deleuze actualises possible worlds, Badiou actualises fictional worlds. The second part explores worlds as political fictions, revisiting Kant’s conception of cosmopolitanism via Rancière’s definition of politics as a conflict of worlds. Rancière’s formulation of political dissensus in fictional and narrative terms sheds a new light on Kant’s description of cosmopolitanism as a perspective that presents history as a novelistic narrative. (shrink)

The essay discusses a significant shift in conceptualizing the notion of representation found in Alain Badiou’s ontology and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics. From Heidegger to Deleuze, the artwork was able to express an ontological truth about the world on the condition that it does not represent it. Badiou’s ‘subtractive’ approach to ontology and Rancière’s redefinition of the modern aesthetic break with representation, however, suggest that there is nothing to express beyond the veil of representation. Instead, representation can only be counteracted by (...) the occurrence of surplus representations that subvert the principles of the dominant regime of representation. The essay provides an understanding of this shift by reversing the Leibnizian conceptual metaphor Adorno used to describe the modern artwork. Unlike ‘windowless monads’, whose seclusion from the world enables them to convey an ontological truth, artworks as ‘monadless windows’ reframe the parameters of what is perceived as reality. (shrink)

The article explores Adorno’s understanding of fetishism and melancholy as immanent to the artwork’s autonomous structure. In order to understand the relation between them, the Freudian understanding of fetishism and melancholy has to be considered along with the more explicit reference to the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. Analysing the implications of Adorno’s claim that commodity fetishism is at the origin of artistic autonomy, the article shows how it should be understood not only as a materialist demystification but also as (...) a reaffirmation of art’s apparent self-sufficiency and its capacity to resist the commodification of society. Nevertheless—the article claims—thas this is only possible if art’s fetishism is dialectically opposed to its melancholy, through which art establishes a relation to the heterogeneous element of the lost object produced by its autonomous form. (shrink)

A peculiar trait unites Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag’s famous accounts of photography: both emphasize the anti-Proustian character of the medium. Two versions of the same assertion are presented in Camera Lucida and On Photography, namely that the nature of photography prevents it from being able to provide the experience needed to regain what was lost in time. Curiously enough, in Raoul Ruiz’s film adaptation, Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, photographs are used by the director to set the world of the (...) novel into motion. Does the opening scene, which shows the writer browsing through photographs of the people he used to know, merely present Proust’s documented habit of collecting photographs of the... (shrink)

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout (...) social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)

The affective turn in photography theory takes as its point of departure Roland Barthes’s move from semiology to affective phenomenology in Camera Lucida. This article, however, considers the way affective phenomenology is itself grounded in the semiological structure of photography. It looks at how, before Camera Lucida was even written, Thierry de Duve had already discussed the affective implications of Barthes’s understanding of photography’s indexical nature. The article then proceeds to rethink the structural affectivity of photography beyond Barthes’s and de (...) Duve’s emphasis on a direct relation between indexicality and loss. Reconsidering photography through Jacques Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime of art, the article rather puts emphasis on the indeterminacy of photography, which results from the way the camera captures and isolates a spatio-temporal fragment. Shifting the focus from indexicality to indeterminacy sheds a different light on the loss implied by the structure of photography, parallel to how Freud understood the difference between mourning and melancholy. (shrink)

The article examines the transformations of the philosophical concept of world as it appears in the cosmopolitan tradition of political thought and its relation to the problem of the border. It focuses particularly on how world is understood as either lost or multiplied in the contexts of modernity, globalisation, and migration. The article discusses postcolonial conceptions of cosmopolitics and the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt to show how the universal ideal of the world is replaced by singular constructions of worlds (...) in terms of the experience of migrants and refugees or the phenomenological horizon of political action. I conclude by suggesting that Jacques Rancière’s understanding of politics as a conflict of worlds can take us beyond the traps of both cosmopolitan universalism and the phenomenological singularity of being-in-the-world. (shrink)

This thoughtful new abridgment is enriched by the brilliant commentary which accompanies it. In it, Laurence Dickey argues that the _Wealth of Nations_ contains--and conceals--a great deal of how Smith actually thought a commercial society works. Guided by his conviction that the so-called Adam Smith Problem--the relationship between ethics and economics in Smith's thinking--is a core element in the argument of the work itself, Dickey's commentary focuses on the devices Smith uses to ground his economics in broadly ethical and (...) social categories. An unparalleled guide to an often difficult and perplexing work. (shrink)

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn attention to the technology’s transformative potential, including what some see as its prospects for causing large-scale harm. We review two influential arguments purporting to show how AI could pose catastrophic risks. The first argument — the Problem of Power-Seeking — claims that, under certain assumptions, advanced AI systems are likely to engage in dangerous power-seeking behavior in pursuit of their goals. We review reasons for thinking that AI systems might seek power, that (...) they might obtain it, that this could lead to catastrophe, and that we might build and deploy such systems anyway. The second argument claims that the development of human-level AI will unlock rapid further progress, culminating in AI systems far more capable than any human — this is the Singularity Hypothesis. Power-seeking behavior on the part of such systems might be particularly dangerous. We discuss a variety of objections to both arguments and conclude by assessing the state of the debate. (shrink)

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value either (...) when it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We’ll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it’s unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we’ll suggest, it’s an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. (shrink)

Toward an ontology of the social-historical -- Proto-institutions and epistemological encounters -- Anthropological aspects of subjectivity: the radical imagination -- Hermeneutical horizons of meaning -- The rediscovery of physis -- Objective knowledge in review -- Rethinking the world of the living being -- Reimaging cosmology -- Conclusion: the circle of creation.

Bringing political philosophy out of the ivory tower and within the reach of all, this book provides us with tools to cut through the complexities of modern ...

This paper attempts to clarify the aesthetical, ontological, and political grounds upon which certain modern philosophers (above all Heidegger and Deleuze) denounce the metaphor as an alternative device for producing meaning through language. It comes to the conclusion that the critique of metaphor is based on the critique of analogy as defined by the laws of representation, which should be replaced by a more direct expression of immanence or being. On the basis of other philosophical assumptions from various traditions and (...) the insights of literary theory, it proposes an alternative model of the metaphor that is no longer founded on analogy and demonstrates its philosophical implications. (shrink)

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

This chapter provides empirical evidence about everyday attitudes concerning euthanasia. These attitudes have important implications for some ethical arguments about euthanasia. Two experiments suggested that some different descriptions of euthanasia have modest effects on people’s moral permissibility judgments regarding euthanasia. Experiment 1 (N = 422) used two different types of materials (scenarios and scales) and found that describing euthanasia differently (‘euthanasia’, ‘aid in dying’, and ‘physician assisted suicide’) had modest effects (≈3 % of the total variance) on permissibility judgments. These (...) effects were largely replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 409). However, in Experiment 2, judgments about euthanasia’s moral permissibility were best predicted by the voluntariness of the treatment. Voluntariness was a stronger predictor than some demographic factors and some domain general elements of moral judgments. These results help inform some debates about the moral permissibility of euthanasia (e.g., the slippery slope argument) suggesting that some of the key premises of those arguments are unwarranted. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

In Freedom: An Impossible Reality (FAIR), Raymond Tallis finds room in a law-abiding universe for a uniquely human form of agency, capable of envisioning and pursuing genuinely open possibilities, thereby deflecting rather than merely inflecting the course of events, in accordance with self-owned intentions, reasons and goals. He argues that the genuinely free human pursuit of such propositional attitudes depends on our acting from a “virtual outside”, at an epistemic distance from the physical world that reveals not only what is (...) the case, but that it is the case. The enactive approach in cognitive science and philosophy of mind aims to supersede the cognitivist traditional that has long dominated the field, by reframing cognition as an agentʼs immediate, embodied engagement with its environment. In an appendix of FAIR, Tallis argues that this approach risks both eliminating propositional attitudes, and collapsing the epistemic distance between agent and world. He concludes that if enactive theorists are to distinguish between genuinely pursuing an intention and merely responding to a stimulus, their corrective to cognitivism is in need of a correction of its own. This paper argues that such a correction is already to be found within the enactive literature, and furthermore, that it bears striking similarities to Tallis own account of what makes human agency unique. It is therefore concluded that the case for freedom set out in FAIR is compatible with the enactive approach. (shrink)

Legendary since his own time as a universal genius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) contributed significantly to almost every branch of learning. One of the creators of modern mathematics, and probably the most sophisticated logician between the Middle Ages and Frege, as well as a pioneer of ecumenical theology, he also wrote extensively on such diverse subjects as history, geology, and physics. But the part of his work that is most studied today is probably his writings in metaphysics, which have been (...) the focus of particularly lively philosophical discussion in the last twenty years or so. The writings contain one of the great classic systems of modern philosophy, but the system must be pieced together from a vast and miscellaneous array of manuscripts, letters, articles, and books, in a way that makes especially strenuous demands on scholarship. This book presents an in-depth interpretation of three important parts of Leibniz's metaphysics, thoroughly grounded in the texts as well as in philosophical analysis and critique. The three areas discussed are the metaphysical part of Leibniz's philosophy of logic, his essentially theological treatment of the central issues of ontology, and his theory of substance (the famous theory of monads). (shrink)

The paper gives a brief characterization of philosophical problems; points up something of their significance for the culture, the social order, and our lives; indicates the methodology appropriate for the problems; and presents a view of the cultural mission of philosophy today. Philosophy attempts to bring under critical review and to correct errors in the cultural mind of our civilization, the prevailing assumptions and beliefs about our knowledge‐yielding powers, the various sectors of the culture, and the basic structure of the (...) world. It holds the cultural mind accountable to the unavoidable presuppositions of experience, thought, and action. Errors in the cultural mind can lead to distortions in the development of the culture and to social and personal pathologies. I contend that our modern Western cultural mind undermines the humanistic dimension of the culture, and ultimately the whole culture, by a restricted view of our knowledge‐yielding powers and the resulting impoverished view of reality. The mission of philosophy today is to point out the errors in our cultural mind and to work for a humanistic cultural reformation. (shrink)

The Significance Argument (SA) for the irreducibility of consciousness is based on a series of new puzzle-cases that I call multiple candidate cases. In these cases, there is a multiplicity of physical-functional properties or relations that are candidates to be identified with the sensible qualities and our consciousness of them, where those candidates are not significantly different. I will argue that these cases show that reductive materialists cannot accommodate the various ways in which consciousness is significant and must allow massive (...) vagueness in conscious experience. I also will argue that a nonreductive theory of the conscious-of relation can easily provide a very satisfying, unified explanation of the ways in which this relation is significant. (shrink)

With massive corruption uncovered in numerous recent corporate scandals, investigating psychological processes underlying unethical behavior among employees has become a critical area of research for organizational scientists. This article seeks to explain why people engage in deceptive and fraudulent activities by focusing on the use of moral-disengagement tactics or rationalizations to justify egregious actions at work. In addition, participation in goal-setting is argued to attenuate the relationship between moral disengagement and unethical behavior. Across two studies, a lab simulation and field (...) survey, a measure of moral disengagement was developed for use with working adults. The hypothesized main and interactive effects of moral disengagement, participation, and unethical behavior were tested and largely confirmed. (shrink)

People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, people’s representations of what is (...) normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: people’s use of the word ‘‘normal” (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms. (shrink)

Am Ende des 18. Jh., als eines der berühmtesten politischen Dokumente, Die Erklärung der Menschen- und Bürgerrechte, verabschiedet wurde, war die Antwort auf die Frage nach dem „Was” der Menschenrechte nicht schwer zu finden, obwohl damit Neuland einer grundsätzlich anderen politischen Moral betreten wurde. Auf diese oder andere Weise wurden die Menschenrechte aus der Vernunft abgeleitet, d. h. aus einem Vermögen, welches ein „Evangelium der reinen Vernunft” schreiben sollte. Eineinhalb Jahrhunderte später, im Jahr 1948, war eine solche Antwort nicht nur (...) hindernisreich, sondern es ist in den einigen mageren Jahren des Wirkens der Allgemeinen Erklärung der Menschenrechte klar geworden, dass das Suchen nach dem „Was” der Menschenrechte jeden Tag mehrere und tiefere Unstimmigkeiten zum Vorschein bringt. Deswegen wird eine strategische Verschiebung vorgeschlagen: Erklären wir die Frage nach dem „Was” als überholt und widmen wir uns dem „Wie” der Menschenrechte. Anstatt der positiven Aufgabe, welches Denken auf das „Was” der Menschenrechte antworten kann, schlagen wir eine negative Aufgabe vor: Welches Denken kann dem „Wie” der Menschenrechte schaden? In diesem Beitrag soll gezeigt werden, dass sich durch die Postmoderne das onto-theo-logische Denken eingeschlichen hat, das als eine Linse wirkt, die den Blick auf die Menschenrechte verzerrt und dadurch eine der größten zeitgenössischen Gefahren für die Menschenrechte mit sich bringt. (shrink)

Krajem 18. stoljeća, kad je donesen jedan od najpoznatijih političkih dokumenata, Deklaracija o pravima čovjeka i građanina, nije bilo teško pronaći odgovor na pitanje o onome »što« ljudskih prava, premda se time stupilo na tlo jednog u temelju drugačijega morala. Na ovaj ili onaj način ljudska prava su se izvodila iz uma, što znači iz jedne moći koja bi trebala napisati »Evanđelje čistoga uma«. Stoljeće i pol kasnije, 1948. godine, jedno takvo pitanje ne samo da je bilo manjkavo, nego je (...) u samo nekoliko godina djelovanja Opće deklaracije o ljudskim pravima postalo jasno da traganje za onim »što« ljudskih prava svaki dan iznosi na vidjelo sve brojnije i dublje nesuglasice. Stoga je predložen jedan strateški pomak: proglasimo pitanje o onom »što« prevladanim i posvetimo se onome »kako« ljudskih prava. Umjesto pozitivne zadaće predlažemo negativnu zadaću: Koje mišljenje može naštetiti onome »kako« ljudskih prava? U ovom se prilogu treba pokazati kako se kroz postmodernu uvuklo onto-teološko mišljenje koje djeluje kao leća koja iskrivljuje pogled na ljudska prava i time predstavlja jednu od najvećih suvremenih prijetnji za ljudska prava. (shrink)

By the end of 18th century, when one of the well-known political documents, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, was enacted, it hasn’t been that difficult to find the answer to the question about “what” of the human rights, though then we acceded to the grounds of a basically different morals. One way or another, human rights were derived from reason, meaning from the ability which should be able to write “The Pure Reason Gospel”. A (...) century and a half later, in 1948, such question not only had certain shortcomings, but in just a few years of practicing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights it became clear that searching for “what” of human rights opens numerous and profound dissidences every day. Therefore a strategic shift was suggested: to proclaim the question about “what” to be prevalent and commit ourselves to the “how” of human rights. Instead of positive assignment , we suggest a negative assignment: What kind of thinking can negatively affect the “how” of human rights? In this enclosure, we need to show how postmodernism brought onto-theological thinking which acts like lenses that give us wrong perspective on human rights and therefore represents one of the biggest contemporary threats for human rights. (shrink)

U ovom članku predstavlja se vrlo raširena škola filozofije prava: pravni pozitivizam. Najpopularnije tumačenje pravnog pozitivizma temelji se na razdvajanju prava i morala. U vrijeme velike skrbi za ljudska prava, ovo razdvajanje razumljiv je uzrok averzije spram pravnog pozitivizma. Pravo, koje je u svojoj posljednjoj instanci uvijek poduprto prisilom, toliko je osjetljiv instrument za posezanje u međuljudske odnose, da ne može biti u potpunosti odvojen od diskursa legitimacije i limitacije državne vlasti.S druge strane, pravni je pozitivizam učenje koje unatoč brojnim (...) usponima u povijesti mu antagonističkog jusnaturalizma, uvijek iznova osigurava svoju vrijednost i valjanost, tako da neki govore čak i o »vječnom vraćanju pozitivizma«. Činjenica je da su razlozi izdvajanja morala od pravnog diskursa vrlo složeni i da nadilaze predodžbu o a-moralnosti ili čak bezbrižnosti pravnika. Razlozi tog izdvajanja kriju se u ontološkoj utemeljenosti novovjekovnog mišljenja. Ovdje se ukazuje na međusobno prožimanje i svojevrsnu upregnutost pozitivizma u ontološke strukture.In diesem Aufsatz wird die weit verbreitete Schule der Rechtsphilosophie, nämlich das Rechtspositivismus dargestellt. In der populärsten Auslegung des Rechtspositivismus wird die Auseinanderscheidung des Rechts und der Moral unterstrichen. Diese Auseinanderscheidung fungiert in der Epoche der großen Besorgtheit für die Menschenrechte verständlicherweise als die Quelle der Abneigung gegen das Rechtspositivismus. Das Recht, das in letzter Instanz immer mit dem Zwang unterstützt ist, ist ein derartig delikates Instrument für die Eingriffe in den menschlichen Beziehungen, das es nicht von dem Diskurs über die Legitimation und Limitation der Staatgewalt absolut abgesondert sein kann. Anderseits ist aber der Rechtspositivismus die Lehre, die auch angesichts vieler Aufstiege ihren historischen Antagonisten, des Jusnaturalismus, immer wieder zur Geltung kam. Einige sprechen deswegen bereits über den »ewigen Wiederkehr des Positivismus». Die Gründe für die Ausschließung der Moral aus dem rechtlichen Diskurs sind sehr komplex in reichen weit jenseits der Vorstellung über das A moralismus oder Ignoranz der Juristen. Die Gründe liegen im ontologischen Grund des neuzeitlichen Denkens. In diesem Aufsatz wird die Eingeflochtenheit des Positivismus in die ontologische Strukturen dargestellt. (shrink)

À la fin du XVIIIe siècle, à l’époque où fut voté l’un des documents politiques les plus célèbresla Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, il n’était pas difficile de répondre à la question du « quoi » des droits de l’homme, même si cela revenait à entrer dans une sphère morale fondamentalement différente. D’une manière ou d’une autre, les droits de l’homme avaient leur origine dans la raison, c’est-à-dire dans un pouvoir qui devrait écrire l’ « Evangile de (...) la raison pure ». Un siècle et demi plus tard, en 1948, une telle question non seulement ne suffisait plus, mais il était devenu clair, déjà à peine quelques années après l’entrée en vigueur de la Déclaration universelle des droits de l’homme, que ce « quoi » des droits de l’homme mettait chaque jour en lumière des divergences de plus en plus profondes. C’est pourquoi nous proposons une avancée stratégique : décidons que la question du « quoi » est dépassée et consacrons-nous à la question du « comment » des droits de l’homme. À la place du problème positif – Quelle pensée peut répondre à la question du « quoi » des droits de l’homme ? -, nous proposons un problème négatif : Quelle pensée peut nuire au « comment » des droits de l’homme ? Cette contribution doit démontrer qu’une pensée onto-théologique s’est introduite dans le post-modernisme, agissant comme une lentille qui déforme le regard porté sur les droits de l’homme et qui représente pour ceux-ci l’une des plus importantes menaces contemporaines. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Must even Confucian rights skeptics—those who are, on account of their Confucian beliefs, skeptical of the existence of human rights, and believe that asserting or recognizing rights is morally wrong—concede that in the workplace, they are morally obligated to recognize rights? Alan Strudler has recently argued that such is the case. In this article, I argue that because Confucian rights skeptics locate wrongness in inconsistency with the idea of “Confucian community,” Confucian community should be viewed as a moral ideal. I (...) then argue that Confucian rights skeptics ought to act in a manner that is consistent with this ideal, even when the ideal has not yet been realized, just as Kantians ought to act consistently with the Kantian kingdom of ends ideal. Accordingly, contrary to Strudler, I argue that Confucian rights skeptics need not concede that they are morally obligated to recognize rights in the workplace. This conclusion suggests the need for inquiry into the metaphysical foundations of these conflicting views. However, such inquiry is commonly thought to lie beyond the scope of philosophical business ethics proper. I conclude the article by suggesting a number of reasons for business ethicists to consider rejecting the prevalent narrow conception of the scope of the discipline.In this discussion I explore challenges to a particular Confucian system of morality that generally eschews reliance on rights. I argue that such a system may at the same time both assert that there are moral problems with rights and assert that it is acceptable to invoke rights in limited contexts. Adam Bailey has objected that the position I defend is inconsistent. I answer Bailey’s objections. (shrink)

This book offers a novel account of grace, framed in terms of Bruno Latour's "principle of irreduction.