Harvey (philosophy, U. of Central Arkansas) argues that the phenomenology of German philosopher Edmund Husserl is a response to the dualisms that emerged from 17th c. philosophy. He sheds light on the relation classical phenomenology has to broad concerns in the history of philosophy. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

A salient if under researched feature of the new age of global inequalities is the rise to prominence of entrepreneurial philanthropy, the pursuit of transformational social goals through philanthropic investment in projects animated by entrepreneurial principles. Super-wealthy entrepreneurs in this way extend their suzerainty from the domain of the economic to the domains of the social and political. We explore the ethics and ethical implications of entrepreneurial philanthropy through systematic comparison with what we call customary philanthropy, which preferences support for (...) established institutions and social practices. We analyse the ethical statements made at interview by 24 elite UK philanthropists, 12 customary and 12 entrepreneurial, to reveal the co-existence of two ethically charged narratives of elite philanthropic motivations, each instrumental in maintaining the established socio-economic order. We conclude that entrepreneurial philanthropy, as an ostensibly efficacious instrument of social justice, is ethically flawed by its unremitting impulse toward ideological purity. (shrink)

"Sex Robots and Solipsism" presents and reflects upon rapidly evolving developments in human-robot relations. It argues that psychological, phenomenological and neuro-physiological evidence suggests that our new media-saturated environment is eroding the human capacity for deep and prolonged concentration, empathy and attachment. As machines become more human-like, humans become more machine-like. This sets the stage for diminished relations between humans - shallow relations that are increasingly capable of being replaced by relations with artificially intelligent machines.

Responding to claims to the contrary, this essay shows how liberal education, the education of critical exposure, indoctrinates students into a style of belief and belief formation. It argues that a common liberal view about what constitutes freedom from indoctrination is precisely the form of indoctrination feared by many conservative communitarians. While I support the style and procedures of liberal education, I argue that we cannot excise all indoctrinating components from it by semantic, logical or epistemic analyses of what indoctrination (...) or education means. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that the deepest roots of Homo sapiens’ propensity towards excessive consumption lie in the emptiness of human awareness, itself possibly rooted in brain plasticity. I attempt to demonstrate how this insight emerged and appeared repeatedly throughout the history of philosophy and religious thought and how industrialized capitalism and consumer culture led to the current domination and envelopment of our lives by the “commodity canopy.” In the final section of the paper, I envision one way that (...) contemporary humanity might use the history of insights about empty, restless awareness and brain plasticity to develop cultures that focus more on doing than having, more on events than on objects. (shrink)

We explore the meaning and implications of Bourdieu’s construct of the field of power and integrate it into a wider conception of the formation and functioning of elites at the highest level in society. Corporate leaders active within the field of power hold prominent roles in numerous organizations, constituting an ‘elite of elites’, whose networks integrate powerful participants from different fields. As ‘bridging actors’, they form coalitions to determine institutional settlements and societal resource flows. We ask how some corporate actors (...) become hyper-agents, those actors who ‘make things happen’, while others remain ‘ordinary’ members of the elite. Three hypotheses are developed and tested using extensive data on the French business elite. Social class emerges as persistently important, challenging the myth of meritocratic inclusion. Our primary contribution to Bourdieusian scholarship lies in our analysis of hyper-agents, revealing the debts these dominants owe to elite schools and privileged classes. (shrink)

This paper sketches the history of unethical behavior of Homo sapiens to other forms of life on planet Earth. I ask, and sketch responses to, the question: How and why is it that we, the so-called “ethical animal,” have been the worst of all animals in relation to other life-forms on our planet? In response to the answers to this question, I claim that we know, and have known for a very long time, what it means to be morally good. (...) But in light of the natural bases of our behavior, I wonder if it will ever be possible for us, as a species, to become so. (shrink)

This essay attempts to understand the search for authenticity in terms of the breakdown of authority in the modern world. The sense of autonomy, I argue, emerges from the need to choose the authorities one will accept. The ever-increasing difficulty of choosing from among authorities is internalized and is experienced as a difficulty of choosing, or “finding” oneself. The shattered authorities on the outside become a fragmented self on the inside. The search for the authentic self, then, is the search (...) for an authority on the inside that has been broken and lost on the outside. The prospects for achieving such selfhood are criticially evaluated. (shrink)

In this response I argue (a) that Jones’ minimalist realism is, also, a minimalist constructionism. And (b) that the silent sphere ofevidence that Jones’ uses to ground his realism, may not be able to supply even a minimalist, strictly negative ground for epistemic endeavors.

If Bob and Joe switched minds, but kept the same bodies, who would be Bob and who would be Joe? If time has no beginnning, how could it have reached now? Conundrums provides a basic, quick introduction to some key problems of philosophy by asking concise questions that evoke classical philosophical problems in a striking manner. It is written in a lively, engaging style and promotes critical thinking skills. This pocketbook is intended for introductory philosophy courses and may be used (...) to generate class discussion or for essay assignments. Topics covered include mind and reality, self and others, God, space and time, and life and death. (shrink)

Three problems are raised for Nicholas Georgalis’s recent work: (1) a problem with regard to the supposed noninferential knowledge of minimal content, (2) a problem with the “necessary condition” Georgalis stipulates for the legitimate application of a first-person methodology to a science of the mind, and (3) a problem with regard to denying phenomenal content to intentional acts.

In this essay I note some surprisingly deep parallels between the accounts of technology offered by Martin Heidegger and by Kevin Kelly. While Heidegger's insight is panoramic and almost prophetic, and grounded in his reading of the history of philosophy, Kelly's account is grounded in empirical and historical data, driven by a naturalistic and scientific understanding of our world. The similarities between these two authors are surprising in light of their different methodological frameworks and theu antithetical attitudes about the benefits (...) and dangers of technology. After setting them in conversation, I ask: "Who has the correct methodological approach and evaluative attitude toward technology"? With some hesitation, I side with Kelly's more hopeful outlook. (shrink)

In this essay I use personal narrative concerning my father and myself to compare and contrast the Heideggerian/sociological idea of "being-alongside-others" in the public world with the more classical philosophical ideal of inter subjective contact between two selves. I try to show that "being-alongside-others " in the public world does not dissolve the issue of intersubjectivity. To do this, I use narrative vignettes and develop some ideas about the role that intimacy plays in developing the sense of self; in particular, (...) I reflect on this process in terms of the relations of parents and children. (shrink)

In this essay I use personal narrative concerning my father and myself to compare and contrast the Heideggerian/sociological idea of "being-alongside-others" in the public world with the more classical philosophical ideal of inter subjective contact between two selves. I try to show that "being-alongside-others " in the public world does not dissolve the issue of intersubjectivity. To do this, I use narrative vignettes and develop some ideas about the role that intimacy plays in developing the sense of self; in particular, (...) I reflect on this process in terms of the relations of parents and children. (shrink)

InUnto this Last, John Ruskin argued that Britain''s industrial society was morally degenerate and pernicious in that it drove the labouring class into cultural and material poverty. The thinking of the Political Economists, which supported the new liberal industrial order, was correspondingly flawed, because it lacked any credible moral element. Ruskin''s writings are in essence an appeal to the business leader to behave in a socially responsible, paternalistic fashion according to his own moral prescriptions. In this way, he believed that (...) British society might be regenerated. This article examines the ways in William Morris sought to give practical expression to these ideas. There is no perfect correspondence between the business notions of John Ruskin and the practice of William Morris. Yet it is evident that Morris stuck to many of his mentor''s ideas with remarkable tenacity; and the operation of the Morris business, especially those aspects relating to design, craftsmanship, work organisation, working conditions, scale and the market, owed much to Ruskin. (shrink)

In this essay Charles Harvey offers a worried reflection on the range, extent, depth, affects, and effects of the perpetual assessment of the person in industrial nations in the contemporary world. Harvey begins his analysis by appealing to the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard to provide an interpretive framework of our situation. He then focuses and concretizes these ideas through examples from his own life and, by extension, the readers. Finally, in light of Pierre Bourdieu's concept (...) of the habitus, Harvey speculates on the implications for selfhood in the contemporary world. Throughout the essay, Harvey uses assessment procedures in higher and public education as exemplary instances of his thesis. (shrink)

In this essay I describe how primary and secondary narcissism are the underlying and motivating psychological states for fundamentalist religious belief. I describe the psychodynamics that produce such a belief state and I make the case that the "fundamentalist personality" is best understood as a form of barely sublimated pathological narcissism. Given the brutality of the human condition, it is understandable why this psychological-metaphysical option is an enticing one, but I follow Ralph Ellis in the conclusion that the consequences of (...) such belief systems produce much more harm than benefit for individuals and humanity at Iarge. (shrink)

“Paradise Well Lost” offers a description and criticism of communitarian claims that in contemporary liberal society the self is in sad shape, that liberal society is out of harmony with the needs of the self, and that such a society makes the good life nearly impossible to achieve. It is argued that communitarian thought is driven by a false and deluded nostalgia for a self-world unity that never was andnever can be, that human consciousness prohibits the neatly unified communialization of (...) self and world that seems desired by much communitarian thinking. A final argument claims that there are nontrivial connections between the communitarian desire for self-world unity, and the twentieth-century emergence of totalitarian society--connections about which it is wise to be worried. (shrink)

“Paradise Well Lost” offers a description and criticism of communitarian claims that in contemporary liberal society the self is in sad shape, that liberal society is out of harmony with the needs of the self, and that such a society makes the good life nearly impossible to achieve. It is argued that communitarian thought is driven by a false and deluded nostalgia for a self-world unity that never was andnever can be, that human consciousness prohibits the neatly unified communialization of (...) self and world that seems desired by much communitarian thinking. A final argument claims that there are nontrivial connections between the communitarian desire for self-world unity, and the twentieth-century emergence of totalitarian society--connections about which it is wise to be worried. (shrink)

This essay briefly explicates, criticizes and supplements the work of two sociologists of “postmodern” society, Ulrich Beck and AnthonyGiddens, as their work develops and relates to the ideas of reflexivity and reflectivity with special regards to the self. Each of these writers bases some significant portion of his work on the idea of the inescapable “reflexivity” of contemporary life for both persons and institutions. For each author, the phenomenon of reflexivity has both positive and negative implications that relate to the (...) traditionalenlightenment ideal of self-fashioning, autonomous selfhood; in each, the enlightenment ideal of reflectively grounded selfhood is existentially embedded in everyday reflexivity but it is simultaneously thinned and divested of many of its formerly most valued traits. This essay explores the nature of reflexivity in late modernity especially as it relates to the modernist ideal of deliberative rationality (reflectivity) and attempts to show that the latter is still necessary to complement the former and, indeed, how it is still possibIe for it to do so. I also try to show in what ways both the fact and the ideal of deliberative rationality lives on in what Giddens calls “post-traditional society” and sociological thought. (shrink)

The Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World maintains a commitment to pluralism in philosophical discourse by encouraging original, unconventional research with regard to contemporary concerns. Among our members, few have championed this commitment more steadfastly than the late Joe Frank Jones III who passed away in January 2015 while planning our annual meeting. Joe had spent a number of years advocating for and developing a graduate-level Bioethics Certificate at Radford University, his home institution. The certificate came to life in (...) 2014, after which Joe and Christian Matheis proposed to co-host the next SPCW meeting on what would become this issue’s prototypical namesake: “America the Bioethical: Vitality, Trauma, and Questions of Bioethics in the 21st Century.” Following Joe’s death, both Christian and Charles W. Harvey carried on planning the conference with Joe’s vision as a guide. (shrink)

I argue that hopes and claims about the liberating power of liberal education are typically exaggerated, naive and wrong. Reflecting upon and borrowing terms from Jim Shelton's essay on "The Subversive Nature of Liberal Education," I use the work of Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron to argue that social education—training in efficient and productive consumeristic life—absorbs, muffles and domesticates any radical content liberal arts education may manage to provide. As with virtually all education, liberal education conserves (...) the society from which it emerges. (shrink)

In this essay I use personal narrative concerning my father and myself to compare and contrast the Heideggerian/sociological idea of "being-alongside-others" in the public world with the more classical philosophical ideal of inter subjective contact between two selves. I try to show that "being-alongside-others " in the public world does not dissolve the issue of intersubjectivity. To do this, I use narrative vignettes and develop some ideas about the role that intimacy plays in developing the sense of self; in particular, (...) I reflect on this process in terms of the relations of parents and children. (shrink)

The many achievements of William Morris are described in this volume, which explores his multifaceted career as a political writer and activist, an artist and designer, a man of letters, and a successful businessman.

In this essay, I argue that popular entertainment can be understood in terms of Husserl’s concepts of epochē, reduction and constitution, and, conversely, that epochē, reduction and constitution can be explicated in terms of popular entertainment. To this end I use Husserl’s concepts to explicate and reflect upon the psychological and ethical effects of an exemplary instance of entertainment, the renowned Star Trek episode entitled “The Measure of a Man.” The importance of such an exercise is twofold: to demonstrate, once (...) again, the fecundity of the methodological procedures Husserl bequeathed to us; more than any other philosopher, he tapped into the fundamental manners in which we lose, make and remake the meanings of our lives; and to demonstrate how popular entertainment, similarly, plays a central role in the making and remaking of the meanings of our lives. If my zig-zag procedure between Husserl’s philosophy and popular entertainment is productive and cogent, in addition to elucidating Husserl’s philosophy, it will demonstrate the reality-generating potency and the constitutive power of entertainment in the contemporary world. Entertainment, via ourselves, has become the primary producer of the meanings via which consciousness constitutes the world. (shrink)