Our century has witnessed violence on an unprecedented scale, in wars that have torn deep into the fabric of national and international life. And as we can see in the recent strife in Bosnia, genocide in Rwanda, and the ongoing struggle to control nuclear weaponry, ancient enmities continue to threaten the lives of masses of human beings. As never before, the question is urgent and practical: How can nations--or ethnic groups, or races--after long, bitter struggles, learn to live side by (...) side in peace? In An Ethic for Enemies, Donald W. Shriver, Jr., President Emeritus of Union Theological Seminary, argues that the solution lies in our capacity to forgive. Taking forgiveness out of its traditional exclusive association with personal religion and morality, Shriver urges us to recognize its importance in the secular political arena. The heart of the book examines three powerful and moving cases from recent American history--our postwar dealings with Germany, with Japan, and our continuing domestic problem with race relations--cases in which acts of forgiveness have had important political consequences. Shriver traces how postwar Germany, in its struggle to break with its political past, progressed from denial of a Nazi past, to a formal acknowledgement of the crimes of Nazi Germany, to providing material compensation for survivors of the Holocaust. He also examines the efforts of Japan and the United States, over time and across boundaries of race and culture, to forgive the wrongs committed by both peoples during the Pacific War. And finally he offers a fascinating discussion of the role of forgiveness in the American civil rights movement. He shows, for instance, that even Malcolm X recognized the need to move from contempt for the integrationist ideal to a more conciliatory, repentant stance toward Civil Rights leaders. Malcolm came to see that only through forgiveness could the separate voices of the African-American movement work together to achieve their goals. If mutual forgiveness was a radical thought in 1964, Shriver reminds us that it has yet to be realized in 1994. "We are a long way from ceasing to hold the sins of the ancestors against their living children," he writes. Yet in this poignant volume, we discover how, by forgiving, enemies can progress and have progressed toward peace. A timely antidote to today's political conflicts, An Ethic for Enemies challenges to us to confront the hatreds that cripple society and threaten to destroy the global village. (shrink)

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient - and common-sense - position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as (...) urged by many recent writers. (shrink)

There is more than one way to say that composition is identity. Yi has distinguished the Weak Composition thesis from the Strong Composition thesis and attributed the former to David Lewis while noting that Lewis associates something like the latter with me. Weak Composition is the thesis that the relation between the parts collectively and their whole is closely analogous to identity. Strong Composition is the thesis that the relation between the parts collectively and their whole is identity. Yi is (...) right that Strong Composition does not fully reflect my view. We must recognize further what, borrowing Lewis's characterization, could be called the "stronger, and stranger" Composition thesis, or what I'll call the Stronger Composition thesis for short. On Strong Composition, it is only collectively that the parts are identical with the whole. On Stronger Composition, they are individually identical with it as well. I will explain and motivate this thesis. (shrink)

How is it possible for David Hume to be both withering skeptic and constructive theorist? I recommend an answer like the Pyrrhonian answer to the question how it is possible to suspend all judgment yet engage in active daily life. Sextus Empiricus distinguishes two kinds of assent: one suspended across the board and one involved with daily living. The first is an act of will based on appreciation of reasons; the second is a causal effect of appearances. Hume makes the (...) same distinction, only he extends the sort of assent involved in daily life to theoretical matters as well. He is a skeptic both in finding no reason to grant the first sort of assent and in being subject to the second. (shrink)

This textbook is a flexible and affordable collection of classic and contemporary primary sources in philosophy. The readings cover seven basic topics of Western Philosophy. The selections are long enough to present a self-contained argument but not so lengthy that students lose track of the main point. Each reading has an outline with study questions, questions for reflection and discussion, and an annotated bibliography. The book includes a glossary and an appendix on logic and argumentation.

In this volume--the first, focused study of Hume on time and identity--Baxter focuses on Hume’s treatment of the concept of numerical identity, which is central to Hume's famous discussions of the external world and personal identity. Hume raises a long unappreciated, and still unresolved, difficulty with the concept of identity: how to represent something as "a medium betwixt unity and number." Superficial resemblance to Frege’s famous puzzle has kept the difficulty in the shadows. Hume’s way of addressing it makes sense (...) only in the context of his unorthodox theory of time. Baxter shows the defensibility of that theory against past dismissive interpretations, especially of Hume’s stance on infinite divisibility. Later the author shows how the difficulty underlies Hume’s later worries about his theory of personal identity, in a new reading motivated by Hume’s important appeals to consciousness. Baxter casts Hume throughout as an acute metaphysician, and reconciles this side of Hume with his overarching Pyrrhonian skepticism. (shrink)

I argue that an individual has aspects numerically identical with it and each other that nonetheless qualitatively differ from it and each other. This discernibility of identicals does not violate Leibniz's Law, however, which concerns only individuals and is silent about their aspects. They are not in its domain of quantification. To argue that there are aspects I will appeal to the internal conflicts of conscious beings. I do not mean to imply that aspects are confined to such cases, but (...) the best way to start is to recognize them experientially. We can feel the conflicts within ourselves. In doing so we can feel some of our aspects. I will try to enhance our understanding of the concept of aspect by listing and formalizing some principles for its use. After that I will argue that all sorts of individual things have aspects, not just people who are conflicted. (shrink)

In the Treatise of Human Nature , Hume argues that, because we have adequate ideas of the smallest parts of space, we can infer that space itself must conform to our representations of it. The paper examines two challenges to this argument based on Descartes's and Locke's treatments of adequate ideas, ideas that fully capture the objects they represent. The first challenge, posed by Arnauld in his Objections to the Meditations , asks how we can know that an idea is (...) adequate. The second challenge, implicit in Locke's Essay , asks how an empiricist can characterize an idea as inadequate, as both picking out an object and yet failing to capture it fully. In showing how Hume responds to these challenges, his theory of perceptual representation is explained and his treatment of space is related to his scepticism. His conclusion is shown not to be a characterization of space as it exists wholly apart from our powers of conception. Instead, in an adumbration of Kant, his claim is restricted to space as it appears to us. (shrink)

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning . This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words. . . . My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

Problems of Rationality is the eagerly awaited fourth volume of Donald Davidson 's philosophical writings. From the 1960s until his death in August 2003 Davidson was perhaps the most influential figure in English-language philosophy, and his work has had a profound effect upon the discipline. His unified theory of the interpretation of thought, meaning, and action holds that rationality is a necessary condition for both mind and interpretation. Davidson here develops this theory to illuminate value judgements and how we (...) understand them; to investigate what the conditions are for attributing mental states to an object or creature; and to grapple with the problems presented by thoughts and actions which seem to be irrational. Anyone working on knowledge, mind, and language will find these essays essential reading. (shrink)

Metaphysics and the Modern World makes the abiding questions of the nature of the self, world, and God available for the modern reader. Donald Phillip Verene presents these questions in both their systematic and historical dimensions, beginning with Aristotle's claim in his Metaphysics that philosophy begins in wonder. The first three chapters concern the origin of metaphysics as the transformation of the conception of reality in ancient Greek mythology, the ontological argument as the basis of Christian metaphysics, and the (...) Renaissance cosmology of infinite worlds and the coincidence of contraries. The final four chapters present the central issues of the metaphysics of history through the New Science of Vico, the principle of true infinity of Hegel's Logic, the dialectic of spirit and life in Cassirer's Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, and the conception of actual entities and God in Whitehead's Process and Reality. In these discussions, the reader will find a lively and learned account of a field of philosophy that is often thought difficult to access, but in this work becomes most accessible and a pleasure to read. -- back cover. (shrink)

The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...) another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning. This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words.... My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise. Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. (shrink)

David Hume is famous as a sceptical philosopher but the nature of his scepticism is difficult to pin down. Hume's True Scepticism provides the first sustained interpretation of Part 4 of Book 1 of Hume's Treatise: his deepest engagement with sceptical arguments, in which he notes that, while reason shows that we ought not to believe the verdicts of reason or the senses, we do so nonetheless. Donald C. Ainslie addresses Hume's theory of representation; his criticisms of Locke, Descartes, (...) and other predecessors; his account of the imagination; his understanding of perceptions and sensory belief; and his bundle theory of the mind and his later rejection of it. (shrink)

Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life offers a bold new assessment of the role of the domestic sphere in modernist literature, architecture, and design.

The Cambridge Companion to Socrates is a collection of essays providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher. Because Socrates himself wrote nothing, our evidence comes from the writings of his friends (above all Plato), his enemies, and later writers. Socrates is thus a literary figure as well as a historical person. Both aspects of Socrates' legacy are covered in this volume. Socrates' character is full of paradox, and so are his philosophical views. These paradoxes have led (...) to deep differences in scholar's interpretation of Socrates and his thought. Mirroring this wide range of thought about Socrates, this volume's contributors are unusually diverse in their background and perspective. The essays in this volume were authored by classical philologists, philosophers, and historians from Germany, Francophone Canada, Britain, and the United States, and they represent a range of interpretive and philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Back to the Concrete: A Pragmatist Response to Oppression Pragmatism is a vital tool for society today, both because it addresses our more pressing social problems and because it advances beyond other available solutions. As a good deal of recent European philosophy has shown, as in the cases of Adorno and Agamben, for example, our social life is mediated by abstractions that oppress us. With its focus on the immediacy of experience, pragmatism enables us to overcome these abstractions and return (...) to concrete life in a liberating way. I argue against Agamben, however, that the return to concrete life amounts to anarchism. I show that it leads to liberalism instead, along the lines laid out by Dewey in Liberalism and Social Action, in which freed individuality is compatible with the exercise of social intelligence and planning. (shrink)

Dewey on The Emotions This paper explores John Dewey's theory of the emotions and his reasons for developing it. The author considers two competing accounts for why Dewey might have developed his theory: one based on his attempt to clarify rationality and one based on his attempt to make us morally responsive agents to nature. After a close examination of key texts, the author concludes that Dewey's theory is designed to make us morally responsive. Dewey's theory of the emotions serves (...) his purpose of arguing for our re-union with nature, in a manner similar, in fact, to Hegel, with the addition that Dewey makes it our express goal to be concerned for nature in our return to it. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to Socrates is a collection of essays providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher. Because Socrates himself wrote nothing, our evidence comes from the writings of his friends , his enemies, and later writers. Socrates is thus a literary figure as well as a historical person. Both aspects of Socrates' legacy are covered in this volume. Socrates' character is full of paradox, and so are his philosophical views. These paradoxes have led to deep (...) differences in scholars' interpretations of Socrates and his thought. Mirroring this wide range of thought about Socrates, this volume's contributors are unusually diverse in their background and perspective. The essays in this volume were authored by classical philologists, philosophers and historians from Germany, Francophone Canada, Britain and the United States, and they represent a range of interpretive and philosophical traditions. (shrink)

A theory of radical interpretation gives the meanings of all sentences of a language, and can be verified by evidence available to someone who does not understand the language. Such evidence cannot include detailed information concerning the beliefs and intentions of speakers, and therefore the theory must simultaneously interpret the utterances of speakers and specify (some of) his beliefs. Analogies and connections with decision theory suggest the kind of theory that will serve for radical interpretation, and how permissible evidence can (...) support it. (shrink)