The exclusion argument is widely thought to put considerable pressure on dualism, if not to refute it outright. We argue to the contrary that, whether or not their position is ultimately true, dualists have a plausible response. The response focuses on the notion of ‘distinctness’ that is employed to distinguish between mental and physical properties: if ‘distinctness’ is understood in one way, the exclusion principle on which the argument rests can be denied by the dualist; if it is understood (...) in another way, the argument is not persuasive. (shrink)

In Topoi/Graphein Christian Abrahamsson maps the paradoxical limit of the in-between to revealthat to be human is to know how tolive with the difference between the known and the unknown. Using filmic case studies, including CodeInconnu, Lord of the Flies, and Apocalypse Now,and focusing on key concerns developed in the works of the philosophers Deleuze, Olsson, and Wittgenstein, Abrahamsson starts within the notion of fixed spatiality, in whichhuman thought and action are anchored in the given of identity. He (...) then movesthrough a social world in which spatiotemporal transformations are neitherfixed nor taken for granted. Finally he edges into the pure temporality that liesbeyond the maps of fixed points and social relations. Each chapter is organized into two subjects: topoi, orexcerpts from the films, and graphein, the author's interpretation ofpresented theoriesto mirror the displacements,transpositions, juxtapositions, fluctuations, and transformations between delimited categories. A landmark work in the study of human geography, Abrahamsson's book proposes that academic and intellectual attention should focus on the spatialization between meaning and its materialization in everyday life. (shrink)

This book explores Nietzsche's philosophical naturalism in its historical context, showing that his position is best understood against the background of encounters between neo-Kantianism and the life sciences in the nineteenth century. Analyzing most of Nietzsche's writings from the late 1860s onwards, Christian J. Emden reconstructs Nietzsche's naturalism and argues for a new understanding of his account of nature and normativity. Emden proposes historical reasons why Nietzsche came to adopt the position he did; his genealogy of values and his (...) account of a will to power are as much influenced by Kantian thought as they are by nineteenth-century debates on teleology, biological functions, and theories of evolution. This rich and wide-ranging study will be of interest to scholars and students of Nietzsche, the history of modern philosophy, intellectual history, and history of science. (shrink)

This book examines the epistemic function of perception and the relation between language and conceptual thought, and provides new ways of conceptualizing the Buddhist defense of the reflexivity thesis of consciousness: namely, that each cognitive event is to be understood as involving a pre-reflective implicit awareness of its own occurrence.

The first impacts of climate change have become evident and are expected to increase dramatically over the next decades. Thus, it becomes more and more pressing to decide who has to compensate those people who suffer from negative impacts of climate change but have neither contributed to the problem nor possess the resources to cope with the consequences. Since the frequently invoked Polluter Pays Principle cannot account for all climate-related harm, I will take a closer look at the much more (...) controversial Beneficiary Pays Principle. It is argued that, appropriately qualified, the Beneficiary Pays Principle can help to identify additional duty-bearers. Based on these results, I briefly comment on three different policy options to generate funds for compensation. (shrink)

The two most influential traditions of contemporary theorizing about democracy, social choice theory and deliberative democracy, are generally thought to be at loggerheads, in that the former demonstrates the impossibility, instability or meaninglessness of the rational collective outcomes sought by the latter. We argue that the two traditions can be reconciled. After expounding the central Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility results, we reassess their implications, identifying the conditions under which meaningful democratic decision making is possible. We argue that deliberation can (...) promote these conditions, and hence that social choice theory suggests not that democratic decision making is impossible, but rather that democracy must have a deliberative aspect. (shrink)

This volume deals with the connection between thinking-and-speaking and our form of life. All contributions engage with Wittgenstein’s approach to this topic. As a whole, the volume takes a stance against both biological and ethnological interpretations of the notion "form of life" and seeks to promote a broadly logico-linguistic understanding instead. The structure of this book is threefold. Part one focuses on lines of thinking that lead from Wittgenstein’s earlier thought to the concept of form of life in his (...) later work. Contributions to part two examine the concrete philosophical function of this notion as well as the ways in which it differs from cognate concepts. Contributions to part three put Wittgenstein’s notion of form of life in perspective by relating it to phenomenology, ordinary language philosophy and problems in contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Varied theories and models of development have been advanced by many scholars to explain the failure of developmental theories and policies in Africa. This paper critically reviews the existing literature on the bane of development in Africa, arriving at what it considers as the most fundamental twin minions of underdevelopment in the continent. The two implicated interrelated issues are thought predicament and unwillingness to act. Whereas thought predicament affects the intellectual faculty, unwillingness to act is the defect of (...) the volitional and affective faculties. This paper strongly claims that without first rectifying these three core faculties of the African person, the continent can at best be chasing shadows. This, however, does not suggest that all other reasons for underdevelopment are insignificant or implausible. Well-planned educational system and deliberate conscientiousness towards enhancing the intellectual, volitional and affective faculties of humans are key to sustainable development of any state in Africa. Keywords : Thought Predicament, Unwillingness to Act, Underdevelopment, Africa. (shrink)

Majority cycling and related social choice paradoxes are often thought to threaten the meaningfulness of democracy. But deliberation can prevent majority cycles – not by inducing unanimity, which is unrealistic, but by bringing preferences closer to single-peakedness. We present the first empirical test of this hypothesis, using data from Deliberative Polls. Comparing preferences before and after deliberation, we find increases in proximity to single-peakedness. The increases are greater for lower versus higher salience issues and for individuals who seem to (...) have deliberated more versus less effectively. They are not merely a byproduct of increased substantive agreement. Our results both refine and support the idea that deliberation, by increasing proximity to single-peakedness, provides an escape from the problem of majority cycling. (shrink)

An updated edition of a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis from a postfordist perspective. The 2010 English-language edition of Christian Marazzi's The Violence of Financial Capitalism made a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis available to an expanded readership. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent events, up to and including the G20 summit in July 2010 and the broad consensus to reduce government spending that emerged from it. Marazzi, a leading figure in the (...) European postfordist movement, argues that the processes of financialization are not simply irregularities between the traditional categories of wages, rent, and profit, but rather a new type of accumulation adapted to the processes of social and cognitive production today. The financial crisis, he contends, is a fundamental component of contemporary accumulation and not a classic lack of economic growth. Marazzi shows that individual debt and the management of financial markets are actually techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor, general intellect, and social cooperation. The financial crisis has radically undermined the very concept of unilateral and multilateral economico-political hegemony, and Marazzi discusses efforts toward a new geomonetary order that have emerged around the globe in response. Offering a radically new understanding of the current stage of international economics as well as crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form, The Violence of Financial Capitalism is a valuable addition to the contemporary arsenal of postfordist thought. This edition includes the glossary of the esoteric neolanguage of financial capitalism—”Words in Crisis,” from “AAA” to “toxic asset”—written for the first English-language edition, and offers a new afterword by Marazzi. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise three sets of issues inspired by Amy Coplan's paper, “Will the Real Empathy Please Stand Up.” They concern whether we need to distinguish between the three phenomena as Coplan suggests, what method(s) should be used in making those distinctions, and whether they are in fact made correctly.

If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for metacognition? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing (...) the problem of self-knowledge in terms of the relation between phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge. Concepts of consciousness such as “introspective awareness” and “reflexive self-awareness” are grounded in phenomenal experiences rather than physical events and processes. As such they yield a different kind of self-knowledge than what can be gained by applying externalist conceptual schemas to understanding the mind. I argue that Dharmakīrti’s theory of content can be seen as endorsing the efficacy of phenomenal experience as a vehicle for self-knowledge. (shrink)

This paper analyses the early history of David Bohm’s mechanics from the perspective of Ludwik Fleck’s thought-collectives and shows how the thought-style of the scientific community limits the possible modes of thinking and what new possibilities for the construction of a new theory arise if these limits are removed.

Predictive Processing (PP) is an increasingly influential neurocognitive-computational framework. PP research has so far focused predominantly on lower level perceptual, motor, and various psychological phenomena. But PP seems to face a “scale-up challenge”: How can it be extended to conceptual thought, language, and other higher cognitive competencies? Compositionality, arguably a central feature of conceptual thought, cannot easily be accounted for in PP because it is not couched in terms of classical symbol processing. I argue, using the example of (...) language, that there is no strong reason to think that PP cannot be scaled up to higher cognition. I suggest that the tacitly assumed common-sense conception of language as Generative Grammar (“folk linguistics”) and its notion of composition leads to the scale-up concerns. Fodor’s Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH) plays the role of a cognitive computational paradigm for folk linguistics. Therefore, we do not take LOTH as facing problems with higher cognition, at least with regard to compositionality. But PP can plausibly play the role of a cognitive-computational paradigm for an alternative conception of language, namely Construction Grammar. If Construction Grammar is a plausible alternative to folk linguistics, then PP is not in a worse position than LOTH. (shrink)

Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially (...) thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account of character trait possession. (shrink)

This book explores Friedrich Nietzsche's understanding of modern political culture and his position in the history of modern political thought. Surveying Nietzsche's entire intellectual career from his years as a student in Bonn and Leipzig during the 1860s to his genealogical project of the 1880s, Christian Emden contributes to a historically informed discussion of Nietzsche's response to the political predicaments of modernity, and sheds new light on the intellectual and political culture in Germany as the ideals of the (...) Enlightenment gave way to the demands of the modern nation state. This is a distinguished addition to the series of Ideas in Context, and a major reassessment of a philosopher and aphorist whose stature among post-enlightenment European thinkers is now almost unrivalled. (shrink)

Three experts in media ethics reexamine ethical behaviour in news gathering and reporting. The book combines a wide range of real-life and hypothetical examples of ethical dilemmas in news reporting with a thoughtful critique of the underlying individualistic theories of mainstream media ethics.

Wittgenstein wrote: “No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought-processes from brain processes.” In general, he rejects what he calls “psycho-physical parallelism.” In Sect. 1, I explain Wittgenstein’s position on this topic and how his followers defend it. In Sect. 2, I argue against Wittgenstein, contending that there is “thought” in a wider sense and (...) that it can be “manifested” without expression. Thought does not need to be ordinarily expressed or even expressible, and it can be read off from the brain, provided one has sufficient technology, data, and understanding of the subject’s interaction with the environment. In Sect. 3, I offer results from brain-science in support of my claims. (shrink)

This paper aims to introduce the German Romantic poet Novalis into the discussion of the modern ecological crisis. In particular we examine Novalis' unique philosophy of nature as a You in which he deals with both of the two aspects of the relationship between humans and nature: their original identity as well as the distinction between them. We analyse the way in which Novalis understood the relationship between nature and humankind dynamically, and show the significance of his concept of poetry (...) for this question. This concept is analysed and described in respect to its principal features: creativity and love. The former is regarded by Novalis as a general capacity of humans as well as an expression of nature itself. Together with love it forms the base for a possible harmonious relationship between humans and nature. We furthermore interpret Novalis' economic thought against the general background of his philosophy of nature and his understanding of humankind. Novalis recognises the crucial role economic action plays in the relationship between nature and humankind and he offers some important insights into this issue. Finally, we discuss the relevance of Novalis' concept of nature as a You for environmental philosophy. By comparison with other concepts of nature in the modern environmental debate, we show how Novalis' thought offers a new perspective on the human–nature relationship and thus fruitful stimulation for today's environmental philosophy. (shrink)

At the core of republican thought, on Philip Pettit’s account, lies the conception of freedom as non-domination, as opposed to freedom as noninterference in the liberal sense. I revisit the distinction between liberal and republican freedom and argue that republican freedom incorporates a particular rule-of-law requirement, whereas liberal freedom does not. Liberals may also endorse such a requirement, but not as part of their conception of freedom itself. I offer a formal analysis of this rule-of-law requirement and compare liberal (...) and republican freedom on its basis. While I agree with Pettit that republican freedom has broader implications than liberal freedom, I conclude that we face a trade-off between two dimensions of freedom (scope and robustness) and that it is harder for republicans to solve that trade-off than it is for liberals. Key Words: freedom • republicanism • liberalism • noninterference • non-domination • rule of law • robustness • liberal paradox. (shrink)

Predictive processing, an increasingly popular paradigm in cognitive sciences, has focused primarily on giving accounts of perception, motor control and a host of psychological phenomena, including consciousness. But higher cognitive processes, like conceptual thought, language, and logic, have received only limited attention to date and PP still stands disconnected from a huge body of research in those areas. In this thesis, I aim to address this gap and I attempt to go some way towards developing and defending a cognitive-computational (...) approach to higher cognition within the predictive processing paradigm. To test its explanatory potential, I apply it to a range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena. I proceed in three steps. First, I lay out an account of concepts and suggest how concepts are represented, how they can be context-sensitively processed, and how the apparent diversity of formats arise. Secondly, I propose how paradigmatic higher cognitive competencies, like language and logical reasoning, could fit into the PP picture. Thirdly, I apply the PP account of concepts and language to a range of linguistic-conceptual phenomena as test cases, namely: metaphor, the semantic paradox (specifically the Liar Paradox) and copredication. Finally, I discuss some challenges and objections to the PP framework as applied to higher cognition and in general. (shrink)

Stephens and Grahamset themselves an apparently modest task, to understand why people who experience alien voices and inserted thoughts do not believe that they themselves are the source of these experiences. However, it soon becomes clear that there are many connected issues here. In eight short chapters, they address the phenomenology and ontology of consciousness, the phenomenology of alien voices, inserted thoughts, obsessive-compulsive thoughts and feelings, and other cases of unusual experience often associated with psychopathology, including brief discussion of multiple (...) personality disorder. They survey some of the main empirical explanations of the phenomenology, set out the shortcomings of these theories, and end by proposing their own schematic account. (shrink)

I describe a thought experiment in which an agent must choose between suffering a greater pain in the past or a lesser pain in the future. This case demonstrates that the ‘temporal value asymmetry’ – our disposition to attribute greater significance to future pleasures and pains than to past – can have consequences for the rationality of actions as well as attitudes. This fact, I argue, blocks attempts to vindicate the temporal value asymmetry as a useful heuristic tied to (...) the asymmetry of causation. Since the two standard arguments for the rationality of the temporal value asymmetry appeal to causal asymmetry and the passage of time respectively, the failure of the causal asymmetry explanation suggests that the B-theory, which rejects temporal passage, has substantial revisionary implications concerning our attitudes toward past and future experience. (shrink)

The papyri transmit a part of the testimonia relevant to pre-Socratic philosophy. The ʼCorpus dei Papiri Filosofici‛ takes this material only partly into account. In this volume, a team of specialists discusses some of the most important papyrological texts that are major instruments for reconstructing pre-Socratic philosophy and doxography. Furthermore, these texts help to increase our knowledge of how pre-Socratic thought – through contributions to physics, cosmology, ethics, ontology, theology, anthropology, hermeneutics, and aesthetics – paved the way for the (...) canonic scientific fields of European culture. More specifically, each paper tackles papyrological texts concerning the Orphics, the Milesians, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the early Atomists, and the Sophists. For the first time in the field of pre-Socratics studies, several papers are devoted to the Herculanean sources, along with others concerning the Graeco-Egyptian papyri and the Derveni Papyrus. (shrink)

Focusing on the close connection between Friedrich Nietzsche's historical thought and the discourse of German historicism in the second half of the nineteenth century, this article argues in a thick contextual reading that Nietzsche's second VomNutzenundNachtheilderHistoriefürdasLeben(1874), needs to be understood as a reflection on the political dimension of historical consciousness, outlining what I shall term a In contrast to the standard emphasis on Nietzsche's presumed aestheticism, he is shown to react to rather specific developments within the contemporary intellectual context, (...) such as the establishment of specific historical foundation myths for a new German nation state, exemplified by the public monuments and commemorations of the 1870s, the effect of such foundation myths on the political imagination of historical scholarship, and the intellectual antagonism between Basel's and the German nation state. (shrink)

Does thought depend on language? Primarily as a consequence of the cognitive turn in empirical disciplines like psychology and ethology, many current empirical researchers and empirically minded philosophers tend to answer this question in the negative. This book rejects this mainstream view and develops a philosophical argument in favor of a universal dependence of language on thought. In doing so, it comprises insights of two primary representatives of 20 th century and contemporary philosophy, namely Donald Davidson and Robert (...) Brandom. Barth offers an introduction to the debate concerning the language-dependence of thought and lays the methodological foundation for the subsequent argument in favor of a universal dependence of thought on language, presenting an account and defense of the transcendental method in reference to the writings of Peter F. Strawson. He then offers a transcendental argument in favor of a universal language-dependence of thought, beginning with a reevaluation of a basic idea for an argument originally presented by Donald Davidson. Later, two main objections to the conclusion of this transcendental argument are addressed and rejected using Robert Brandom’s inferentialist and normativist account of thought and language. In the course of doing so, the recent debate on Brandom’s work is addressed extensively, and main objections to Brandom’s work are presented and answered. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the viability and importance of conceptual analysis to philosophical inquiry. My argument proceeds in two steps. In a first step, I argue that we rely on the notions guiding how we do and would apply our terms in order to evaluate the counterfactual conditionals we find at the heart of philosophical thought experiments. In a second step, I argue that our notions determine what the relevant terms mean in our mouth. In order to defend (...) the resulting neo-descriptivist semantics, I put forth an epistemic argument for descriptivism—the argument from communication. I conclude that philosophical thought experiments are exercises in conceptual analysis. (shrink)

What are some of the distinctive virtues of the confluence approach that sets it apart from other attempts to do philosophy across cultural boundaries? First, unlike comparing and contrasting, the confluence approach remains faithful to the dominant conception of philosophy as an intellectual enterprise centered on dialogue and argumentation, in which philosophers pursue unresolved problems by building on the achievements of their acknowledged forbears. Second, confluence philosophy implements a syncretic and creative approach to doing philosophy by drawing on non-Western philosophical (...) sources while using the tools and conceptual resources of analytic philosophy. Third and last, the confluence approach highlights possible tensions when the traditions of thought brought into dialogue are on a diverging path on certain matters. Contemporary philosophy, at least in the Anglophone world and its satellites, is an avowedly secular enterprise, deferring to the sciences for its account of what can be said to exist at the most fundamental level and for its understanding of the processes that realize cognition. Buddhism at its core is often understood as a soteriological project manly concerned with overcoming suffering, which sometimes is taken to entail an insight into the emptiness of all the constitutive elements of existence and/or experience. Confluence philosophy thus makes it possible to ask whether defending a theoretical framework which affirms this truth of emptiness means that one must engage in the very sort of activity, namely, rational self-assertion, that hinders enlightenment. (shrink)

The exclusion argument is widely thought to put considerable pressure on dualism if not to refute it outright. We argue to the contrary that, whether or not their position is ultimately true, dualists have a plausible response. The response focuses on the notion of ‘distinctness’ as it occurs in the argument: if 'distinctness' is understood one way, the exclusion principle on which the argument is founded can be denied by the dualist; if it is understood another way, the argument (...) is not persuasive. (shrink)

Nagarjuna and Quantum physics. Eastern and Western Modes of Thought. Summary. The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Emptiness’. The Indian philosopher Nagarjuna is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That (...) nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. Reality is without foundation. Or: Reality has the wide open space as foundation. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realised that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna, we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalisation. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalisation might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. -/-. (shrink)

What is the nature of thought? Is thought linguistic and some kind of silent speech? Or is it pre-linguistic and some kind of association of ideas and images in the mind? Does it happen in the brain? I will focus on the last question, but also say something about the other two. I will present a simple thought experiment to show that thought must somehow happen in the brain. But then I will soften the impression this (...) might give by pointing out what is needed to read those thoughts. Simply put, ontologically thought is in the brain, epistemologically it is not. (shrink)

Brian Leiter and Peter Kail have delivered thoughtful critiques of my book, Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century.1 It is a great pleasure to respond to these critiques, since they raise some crucial issues with regard to Nietzsche’s understanding of naturalism and normativity. On the one hand, there are many areas of agreement: Nietzsche’s philosophical project is best understood along the lines of naturalism; developments in the nineteenth-century life sciences, broadly speaking, play a crucial role (...) in the formation of Nietzsche’s naturalism; and Nietzsche’s relationship to both Darwin and Darwin’s neo-Kantian interpreters is more complex than generally assumed. On the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social ThoughtCharles W. ChristianBonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought Edited by Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 304 pp. $25.00Countless books have been written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., assessing their individual leadership in the areas of social justice and theology in the twentieth (...) century. Relatively few works have brought these two individuals together in comparative analysis. This book, edited by Willis [End Page 216] Jenkins (assistant professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School) and Jennifer M. McBride (visiting lecturer at Candler Divinity School), seeks to do that; it brings together a wide array of scholars in the fields of ethics, theology, pastoral ministry, political theory, African American studies, and feminist theology.As McBride points out in her introduction, the “significant differences in their historic, sociopolitical contexts” can present challenges in comparing the work of these two men and in seeking to contemporize them (8). However, the thought and life of both martyrs “demand[s] action”; in other words, the “thought” of both Bonhoeffer and King remains incomplete without “courageous, constructive, redemptive social engagement” (3). It is in this spirit that the book unfolds.The book is divided into four parts. The first four chapters compose part 1 (titled “Critical Distance”), which takes a broader look at the legacies, key concepts, and limitations or critiques of the thought of Bonhoeffer and King. For example, the second chapter by Stephen R. Haynes (“King and Bonhoeffer as Protestant Saints”) reminds us of the perils of the larger-than-life legacies of both these individuals. When noteworthy persons become personalities or cultural heroes, key aspects of their legacies can be minimized or overlooked. This is particularly important in contemporary American settings where politicians and commentators tend to reduce the legacies of both Bonhoeffer and King to fit their own political agendas.Part 2 pays specific attention to the influence of Bonhoeffer and King on matters related to social justice, such as poverty, racism, and violence. Among the notable contributions in this section is the chapter by Craig J. Slane that deals with the “unexpected turn toward violence” (112) for Bonhoeffer during his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler during World War II. Part 3 looks at the ways in which the lives and teaching (and especially preaching, in King’s life in particular) of Bonhoeffer and King are instruments of social redemption. In addition to noting the influence of Niebuhr’s emphasis on social sin and social redemption on King’s preaching and leadership, it points out that both Bonhoeffer and King were deeply influenced by the economic and social upheavals of their time; their preaching, teaching, and writing sought to address, in concrete ways, the racial, economic, and political realities of their contexts. In part 4, “Peacemaking,” four authors highlight the contributions King and Bonhoeffer have made to peacemaking and the influence these contributions continue to have. They discuss both men’s commitment to nonviolence and pacifism and the particular challenges this commitment created for them (especially for Bonhoeffer, given his participation in a plot to overthrow Hitler).The essays in this book do not present these two martyrs as unblemished. The book contains rich discussions that honestly assess their personal struggles [End Page 217] of conscience as well as their contextual struggles with such issues as the role of women. Furthermore, the reader will find a solid introduction to the lives and thought of both men while at the same time sitting in on a diverse conversation about how their influential interpretations of the Christian faith can continue to be fleshed out. May this kind of conversation (and action) continue!Charles W. ChristianMount Vernon Nazarene UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

For theologians, to conceive of God in terms of light has some undeniable advantages, allowing a middle-of-the road position between the two extremes of thinking about God in terms of a purely disembodied, unfathomable, unsensible being, and of crediting Him with a body, possibly even a human body. This paper first reviews the reasons why God, in early medieval Islam, was never fully theorized in terms of light. It then proceeds to discuss light-related narratives in two major, late-medieval compilations of (...) hadiths about the afterlife, by al-Suyuti and al-Majlisi, suggesting that eschatology was the area in which God’s light continued to shine in Islam, and the backdoor through which a theology of light, in the thought of al-Suhrawardi and his followers, made a triumphant re-entry into Islamic thought. (shrink)

A provocative exploration of how computers are reshaping ideas about what it means to be human profiles the annual Turing Test to assess a computer's capacity for thought while analyzing related philosophical, biological and moral issues.

There can be little doubt that, over the last decade or so, the work of Carl Schmitt has emerged as a central point of reference, in both positive and negative terms, for many debates within contemporary political theory. Despite Schmitt's notoriously controversial and complex position within the intellectual field of modern political thought, a growing interest, for instance, in his critique of parliamentary democracy and his conceptualization of partisan warfare can be felt not only among political movements with revolutionary (...) agendas, but it can also easily be observed in main-stream political thought on both sides of the Atlantic.1 With the…. (shrink)

The turn of the century saw a significant increase in the amount of attention being paid by philosophers to empirical issues about moral character. Dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the West, and Confucius in the East, philosophers have traditionally drawn on empirical data to some extent in their theorizing about character. One of the main differences in recent years has been the source of this empirical data, namely the work of social and personality psychologists on morally (...) relevant thought and action. -/- This entry briefly examines four recent empirical approaches to moral character. It will draw on the psychology literature where appropriate, but the main focus will be on the significance of that work for philosophers interested in better understanding moral character. The four areas are situationism, the CAPS model, the Big Five model, and the VIA. The remainder of this entry devotes a section to each of them. (shrink)

Christiane Bailey and Chloë Taylor (Editorial Introduction) Sue Donaldson (Stirring the Pot - A short play in six scenes) Ralph Acampora (La diversification de la recherche en éthique animale et en études animales) Eva Giraud (Veganism as Affirmative Biopolitics: Moving Towards a Posthumanist Ethics?) Leonard Lawlor (The Flipside of Violence, or Beyond the Thought of Good Enough) Kelly Struthers Montford (The “Present Referent”: Nonhuman Animal Sacrifice and the Constitution of Dominant Albertan Identity) James Stanescu (Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory (...) Farms, and the Advent of Deading Life) Ian Werkheiser (Domination and Consumption: An Examination of Veganism, Anarchism, and Ecofeminism) Cynthia Willett (Water and Wing Give Wonder: Trans-Species Cosmopolitanism) Corey Lee Wrenn (Nonhuman Animal Rights, Alternative Food Systems, and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex) Emily R. Douglas (Eat or Be Eaten: A Feminist Phenomenology of Women as Food) Gary Steiner’s Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) Chloë Taylor (“Postmodern” Critical Animal Theory: A Defense) Patrick Llored (La déconstruction derridienne peut-elle fonder une communauté politique et morale entre vivants humains et non humains?) Jan Dutkiewicz (“Postmodernism,” Politics, and Pigs) Gary Steiner (Response to Commentators). (shrink)

One of the terminological constants in the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze is the word 'immanence', and it has therefore become a foothold for those wishing to understand exactly what 'Deleuzian philosophy' is. Deleuze's philosophy of immanence is held to be fundamentally characterised by its opposition to all philosophies of 'transcendence'. On that basis, it is widely believed that Deleuze's project is premised on a return to a materialist metaphysics. Christian Kerslake argues that such an interpretation is fundamentally misconceived, (...) and has led to misunderstandings of Deleuze's philosophy, which is rather one of the latest heirs to the post-Kantian tradition of thought about immanence. This will be the first book to assess Deleuze's relationship to Kantian epistemology and post-Kantian philosophy, and will attempt to make Deleuze's philosophy intelligible to students working within that tradition. But it also attempts to reconstruct our image of the post-Kantian tradition, isolating a lineage that takes shape in the work of Schelling and Wronski, and which is developed in the twentieth century by Bergson, Warrain and Deleuze. (shrink)

This paper deals with the relationships between theoretical and clinic instances deriving from Lacan’s conception of the real and of reality . It’s main argument is that the disparity between the latter notions is the spring of the insurmountable tensions between ethics and epistemology , one that a philosophical regard shows to be constitutive of the psychoanalytical practice. Lacan’s program of a negative ontology allows us to establish connections between different trends in psychoanalytical thought and practice as well as (...) in general between psychoanalysis and philosophy. (shrink)

The present collection of essays is devoted to the Christian philosophy of the most prolific and most speculatively ambitious of the Cambridge Origenists, Henry More. Not only did More revere Origen, whom he extolled as a "holy sage" and "that miracle of the Christian world", but he also developed a philosophical system which hinged upon the Origenian notions of universal divine goodness and libertarian human freedom. Throughout his life, More subscribed to the ancient theology of the pre-existence of (...) souls and took issue with the early modern philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes and Baruch de Spinoza. His vision of God's goodness, experienced in his early school years at Eton, became the cornerstone of an Origenist rationalism which envisaged an extended world animated by divine thought and inhabited by self-moving rational agents. More's philosophy is the crowning attainment of the early modern rediscovery of Origen as well as a neglected major rationalist system in its own right which went on to exert decisive influence upon all subsequent western metaphysics. The essays collected in the first part provide a detailed introduction to More's voluminous writings. After a comprehensive general overview of his metaphysical and ethical system, the essays expound More's historical context and his philosophical development from his early poetry in the 1640s to his mature philosophical and theological prose works of the 50s, 60s and 70s. In addition, the reception of More and Origen in the later Cambridge Origenists and in Isaac Newton is outlined. The second part contains several excerpts from More's influential Latin works first translated into English by the editor. (shrink)

The phrase ‘critique of power’ refers to that analytical program within social philosophy that concerns the discord between the individual and the social orders. From the perspective of many critical theorists, Hannah Arendt’s conception of power, however, is considered unsuitable for such a critical enterprise. In contrast to this assumption, the article argues for reading Hannah Arendt’s concept of power in the light of a critical theory of the political. The critical potential of her thoughts is embedded in her concept (...) of power, which provides an as yet disregarded but highly relevant approach for the analysis of contemporary political orders. Despite the great number of writings concerned with Arendt’s concept of power, this critical potential has not yet been unfolded. This is primarily due to a constricted reading of her concept of power where it is seen as per se normatively positive and non-repressive. In order to overcome this misleading interpretation, the article reconstructs Arendt’s concept of power and argues that her political thinking should be literally read as a critique of power. To illustrate this critical potential, the article unfolds 5 dimensions of Arendt’s analysis of power: the political-parcipitative; the socio-economic; the political-institutional; the ideological-critical; and the ethical. (shrink)

This paper assumes that there is a distinction between empirical and non-empirical science. It also assumes that empirical science has two complementary parts, namely, theorization and experimentation. The paper focuses strictly on the experimental aspect of science. It is a call for reformation in African experimental science. Following a deep historical understanding of the revolution that brought about experimental philosophy this paper admits that magic was the mother, not just the “bastard sister” of empirical science. It uncovers the fact that (...) magic added the dimension of experimentation to science. This paper somewhat maintains that most of the ideas presented by some African scholars contain vestiges of the magical tradition in them. Even though this might not be a flaw by any reasonable standard, the paper still argues that there is a genuine need to separate magic from science, if we ever crave for any form of material/physical progress in Africa. I insist that the thrust of the call for paradigm shift in this paper is centered basically on experimentation. The issue of theoretical entities was introduced only to the extent such entities enhance experimental realism in the practice of African science. Of course, reformation can equally take place at the level of scientific theorization, but that is strictly beyond the scope of this paper. The fact is that those who are versed on the issues of experimentation should begin to get more focused on that aspect; and those who are given to theorization should settle with the formulation of well-structured theories. Time has indeed come for us to properly streamline our thoughts and make progress in the direction of African experimental science. In making this clarion call, we adopted a combined approach of hermeneutics and analysis. Keywords : Magic, African science, experimental science, paradigm, African thought. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Olivi’s theory of representation and aims at showing that his theory does not endorse epistemological representationalism . Moreover, there is no representation without self-representation for Olivi. Therefore, his account of self-representation or inner experience resembles modern higher-order theories of consciousness. But unlike most modern authors, Olivi seems to combine a higher-order thought theory with a higher-order perception one.