In this work, I investigate the implications of reversing the common assumption of rationality on behalf of human agents typically underlying philosophical research. Instead, I assume that human agents can become rational only if they learn to edge against their dumbness. Specifically, I show that intelligence cannot be considered the opposite of dumbness. To this end, I embrace the difference among System 1, System 2, and System 1.5. On these grounds, I argue that System 2 can be considered the system (...) of intelligence, whereas Systems 1 and 1.5 can be viewed as the systems of rationality. More precisely, I argue that System 2 concerns theoretical reasoning, whereas System 1 and 1.5 concern practical reasoning. Accordingly, I show that people are dumber whenever they fail to have rational control over System 1 via System 1.5, whereas people become more rational whenever they manage to have rational control over System 1 via System 1.5. Interestingly, both cases can be considered the causes of two distinct social processes. On one side, when dumbness increases among individuals, social groups achieve coordination that detriments general welfare. On the other, when dumbness decreases among individuals, social groups achieve coordination that maximizes general welfare. (shrink)

Meeting held on the theme "Dynamics of religion: philosophical review from Indian perspectives".

Even though the nonidentical is identical—as self-transmitted—it is nonetheless nonidentical: it is otherness to all its identifications.The instants in which a particular frees itself without in turn, by its own particularity, confining others—these instants are anticipations of the unconfined.In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctness, which he shares with everything alive, become uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings. Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness.This revelatory quality of speech and action (...) comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them—that is, in sheer human togetherness. Although .. (shrink)

So far as we know, we are the only species capable of introspection, and thus, sometimes, of insight into our own individual and collective nature. Arguably, the entire discipline of philosophy and, much more recently, of psychology, is premised on this simply stated but complicated fact. We are also a social species, each of us desiring – perhaps, even needing – to live as one among others. Taken together, these perfectly trite observations invite a number of questions regarding the (...) nature of the self and self-consciousness, and about the possibility of successful intersubjective communication. One line of enquiry among these questions, one that is vigorously pursued in The Five Obstructions, concerns the extent to which an individual’s self-understanding depends on the availability to that person of a genuinely second-person perspective. In order properly to understand oneself, does one need to see oneself through another’s eyes – in particular, the eyes of another who is in relation with us? If the answer is affirmative, what obligations do we have to each other to provide secondperson perspectives? How is such a perspective to be achieved? How is it best achieved, morally speaking? As I will try to show here, The Five Obstructions provides a very powerful example of self-revelation facilitated by another. Towards the end.. (shrink)

In this unique and comprehensive book, George McCarthy examines the influence of Greek philosophy, literature, arts, and politics on the development of twentieth-century German social thought. McCarthy demonstrates that the classical spirit vitalized thinkers such as Weber, Heidegger, Freud, Marcuse, Arendt, Gadamer, and Habermas. With the romancing of antiquity, they transformed their understanding of the modern self, political community, and Enlightenment rationality. By viewing contemporary social theory from the framework of the classical world, McCarthy argues, we are capable of (...) thinking beyond the limits of modernity to new possibilities of human reason, science, beauty, and social justice. (shrink)

The Romance of Science pays tribute to the wide-ranging and highly influential work of Trevor Levere, historian of science and author of Poetry Realised in Nature, Transforming Matter, Science and the Canadian Arctic, Affinity and Matter and other significant inquiries in the history of modern science. Expanding on Levere’s many themes and interests, The Romance of Science assembles historians of science -- all influenced by Levere's work -- to explore such matters as the place and space of instruments (...) in science, the role and meaning of science museums, poetry in nature, chemical warfare and warfare in nature, science in Canada and the Arctic, Romanticism, aesthetics and morals in natural philosophy, and the “dismal science” of economics. The Romance of Science explores the interactions between science's romantic, material, institutional and economic engagements with Nature. (shrink)

In Romances with Schools, John Goodlad steps out from behind the public persona of distinguished scholar and advocate for public schooling to offer a moving personal account of a life devoted to educating the young. He deftly interweaves fascinating personal details with reflections on many of the larger issues in education that he has explored throughout his career.

Two things have been missing from discussions of Emerson and skepticism. The first—and the most glaring omission, given his precise, unambiguous definition of skepticism as “unbelief in cause and effect” (“Worship”)—is Emerson’s causationism. The second is his view of skepticism as organically related to a wide array of other forms of anti-realism or “romance.” Only the first can explain the second and thereby give us a better sense of how Emerson’s specific response to skepticism as a philosophical problem fits (...) into his broader, resolutely realist vision of the conduct of life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comic RomanceBenjamin La FargeIOn the surface, it would seem that nothing could be more different from comedy than romance. Comedy deflates, romance inflates. Comedy is realistic, romance fantastical. Comedy reduces, romance elevates. Comedy is democratic, romance heroic. Yet there are underlying similarities. Both involve a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses. In both, appearances are typically mistaken for reality, and both end happily. Above (...) all, both are governed by a structure of illogical logic that generates laughter in one and fantasy in the other.The generic differences between comedy and romance are crucial to a proper understanding of their functions. Comedy celebrates the renewal of life, the relation of man to woman and of man to man, in a spirit of tolerant acceptance, while romance celebrates a narcissistic dream of the self. If the former is best enjoyed in a crowded theater, the latter is usually enjoyed in solitude. Romance is a fiction of wish fulfillment. Since wishful thinking is generally understood as childish, romance is often regarded as a poor cousin among literary genres, haughtily dismissed by highbrows who associate it with the infantile pleasures of their childhood reading and with lowbrow fiction in general. This is precisely why so many sophisticated readers are reluctant to grant science fiction and other forms of fantasy any enduring literary value. In their view the pleasures of such works can not be taken seriously.Yet those childhood pleasures have a lasting appeal that lingers in the mind of every adult. There must be few grown readers who do not harbor a special fondness for the first heroes and heroines they encountered in their favorite childhood stories. Many of those heroes possess [End Page 18] some magical power; and when they place that power in the service of justice, especially the justice of revenge, their appeal is irresistible. I have seen grown men, armed and dressed for battle, avidly reading Superman comics. What stirred them, as it stirred many educated men and women in their childhood, was the spectacle of an omnipotent hero fighting to overcome the wrongs of this world.Even if our sentimental memory of these heroic figures is nothing more than nostalgia for irrecoverable pleasures, their initial impact may be seen as having a formative influence on a child's expectations, as many commentators have thought. In either case, they are all descended from a venerable tradition of literary figures. Superman himself is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, who comes from a long line of English heroes going back to Robin Hood and Merlin, each of whom is involved in righting some injustice. Ultimately, all of them are descended from Odysseus, who reclaimed his rightful kingdom, after an absence of twenty years, by murdering his wife's suitors.Romance, like comedy, is a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses, and these impulses are embodied in the characters that inhabit this dream fiction.1 Like comic characters, the characters of romance evoke in us the same responses of wish and fear, and like comedy itself romance builds toward a catharsis of those two emotions. To achieve that catharsis, romance requires our "willing suspension of disbelief" (as Coleridge put it so memorably), which we have no difficulty in granting, provided only that the story is skillfully told. What we want from romance is the fulfillment of the wishes it arouses; what we get from their fulfillment is the pleasure of story-for-the-sake-of-story. It is this pleasure, in fact, that constitutes the basic, generic purpose of romance.The difference between the two genres, however, can be seen in the kinds of wish and fear they evoke in us, for unlike comedy the feelings of wish and fear evoked by romance are uncomplicated by ambivalence. We may wish to experience the destructive impulse vicariously through the protagonist, but only in order to see him triumph in the end. We are so entirely sympathetic to his enterprise that we cannot possibly wish for his destruction. If he is destroyed, as in the case of Tristan, the hero of the eponymous medieval romance, we are forced to recognize that the love potion he drank with Isolde was his... (shrink)

Suddenly, my research was brusquely interrupted by romance. Conceptually, that is.The precipitant was an essay by Becca Rothfeld about the collected letters of Iris Murdoch, a philosopher at Oxford who strayed, and flourished, as a novelist. “Her scholarly area was ethics, and her primary preoccupation was love, both romantic and platonic,” Rothfeld writes. “This was a topic whose manifest importance she felt was chronically neglected by her peers, most of them analytic philosophers.”1Murdoch is right, I thought. Socrates and friends, (...) lolling around the Symposium talking about beauty and boys, downplayed the physical side of romantic love. Dante chastely chased his beloved Beatrice into... (shrink)

Through discussions of Locke, Behn, Shaftesbury, Hume, and Richardson, this book traces the idea of romance as, in the process of engendering resistance, it comes nonetheless to define the empiricist mind as the reading mind.

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgements Introduction: From Passions to Language: The Transformation of the ImaginationLocke: Metaphorical Romances Behn: Romance from the Stage to the Letter Shaftesbury: Conversation and the Psychology of Romance Hume: Reading Romances, Writing the Self Richardson: How to Read Romance NotesBibliographyIndex.

The study to follow is concerned with the structure of romance in the ancient and Renaissance periods from the perspective of nostalgia, to be defined here as one of the most deeply engrained features of the human psyche. The argument in brief is that of all the literary genres of the early modern era, romance tells the story of homecoming with the greatest sense of imperative, constituting a tropism in the form of a literary motif that originates in (...) the evolutionary engineering of the species. But first to the genre itself. Invariably, these are tales not only of outbound adventure, whether by choice or destiny, but of the return to a place or community that constitutes refuge, family, origins, reunion .. (shrink)

On Michael Walzer's influential account, "dirty hands" characterizes the political leader's choice between absolutist moral demands (to abstain from torture) and consequentialist political reasoning (to do what is necessary to prevent the loss of innocent lives). The impulse to torture a "ticking bomb terrorist" is therefore at least partly pragmatic, straining against morality, while the desire to uphold a ban on torture is purely and properly a moral one. I challenge this Machiavellian view by reinterpreting the dilemma in the framework (...) of the Humean theory of justice and moral sentiment. By interpreting the ticking bomb scenario as a dramatic narrative, I argue that it appeals to properly moral sensibilities, which speak in favour of the use of force against the terrorist. The absolute ban on torture, by contrast, is an artificial virtue and a product of political prudence. On this account, the ticking bomb terrorist dilemma therefore imposes a different burden on the political leader from Walzer's version: an ethic of political responsibility demands that the political leader be prepared to sacrifice her moral soul by upholding the law against moral but politically imprudent demands to break it; while the ticking bomb romance appeals to her feelings of compassionate moral concern towards particular individuals. She dirties her hands morally, not by authorizing torture, but by allowing the terrorist's bomb to detonate and take the lives of the innocent. (shrink)

McCarthy has undertaken an enterprise of enormous scope and considerable interest. One of the virtues of his study is its cross-disciplinary approach. McCarthy has advanced degrees in philosophy and sociology and has done research and lectured extensively in Germany as a guest professor. His book is divided into four major parts. Part 1, “In the Shadow of Ancient Parnassos: The Coming of the Cosmic Night,” has two chapters: “Children of Oedipus and the Tragedy of Modernity: Karl Marx and Friedrich (...) Nietzsche” and “Ancient Economy and Classical Tragedy: Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche.” From the discussion of Nietzsche in these two chapters, one gets a clear impression of McCarthy’s scholarly style. There is no postmodern critical gimmickry nor wild free-associationism. His approach is solid, clear, and heavily researched. He is obviously conversant with the major figures who influenced Nietzsche and familiar, as well, with the work of the key interpreters of Nietzsche. In fact, at times, one wishes that there was not quite such a catalogue of references to other figures and influences. Consider the following passage: “Though trained in the neoclassicism of eighteenthand nineteenth-century authors such as Gottsched, Lessing, Klopstock, Wieland, Voss, A.W. Schlegel, Kleist, Goethe, and Schiller, Nietzsche makes a dramatic break with their perspectives in The Birth of Tragedy. Following upon Winckelmann’s view of the beauty, simplicity, and nobility of the Greek spirit, Lessing’s expansion of the structure of tragedy from Aristotle’s Poetics, Goethe’s views on catharsis and reconciliation in Greek tragedy, and Schiller’s adaptation of tragedy in his Kantian aesthetics, Nietzsche develops a theory of tragedy that also incorporates Schopenhauer’s profound existential resignation in the face of the meaninglessness of the world”. (shrink)

McCarthy has undertaken an enterprise of enormous scope and considerable interest. One of the virtues of his study is its cross-disciplinary approach. McCarthy has advanced degrees in philosophy and sociology and has done research and lectured extensively in Germany as a guest professor. His book is divided into four major parts. Part 1, “In the Shadow of Ancient Parnassos: The Coming of the Cosmic Night,” has two chapters: “Children of Oedipus and the Tragedy of Modernity: Karl Marx and Friedrich (...) Nietzsche” and “Ancient Economy and Classical Tragedy: Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche.” From the discussion of Nietzsche in these two chapters, one gets a clear impression of McCarthy’s scholarly style. There is no postmodern critical gimmickry nor wild free-associationism. His approach is solid, clear, and heavily researched. He is obviously conversant with the major figures who influenced Nietzsche and familiar, as well, with the work of the key interpreters of Nietzsche. In fact, at times, one wishes that there was not quite such a catalogue of references to other figures and influences. Consider the following passage: “Though trained in the neoclassicism of eighteenthand nineteenth-century authors such as Gottsched, Lessing, Klopstock, Wieland, Voss, A.W. Schlegel, Kleist, Goethe, and Schiller, Nietzsche makes a dramatic break with their perspectives in The Birth of Tragedy. Following upon Winckelmann’s view of the beauty, simplicity, and nobility of the Greek spirit, Lessing’s expansion of the structure of tragedy from Aristotle’s Poetics, Goethe’s views on catharsis and reconciliation in Greek tragedy, and Schiller’s adaptation of tragedy in his Kantian aesthetics, Nietzsche develops a theory of tragedy that also incorporates Schopenhauer’s profound existential resignation in the face of the meaninglessness of the world”. (shrink)

The article analyzes the ethical and theological content of the apocryphal Syrian "autobiography" of St. Clement of Rome, as well as its early Slavic translation. The study uses historical-philosophical, patristic and philological methodology to outline the specific teachings, attributed to St. Clement by this Greek-speaking Syrian text from the pseudo-Clementine cycle. The methods of comparative textology and translation studies are used to analyze the features of the Slavic version of the work. The study revealed that, contrary to the ideas of (...) the publisher of the Slavic version, P. Lavrov, the translation was undoubtedly made according to the archaic, pre-metaphrasic version of the work. Therefore, it can be dated to the ninth century and come from the school of Cyril and Methodius. The popularity of the monument among Slavic readers is partly explained by the archaic features of the original version of the work preserved in the translation, such as graphic imagery, expressive presentation, and numerous dialogues. Such a lively account facilitated the perception of the conceptually rich ethical content of the work. At the heart of both Greek and Slavic versions is the ethical category of philanthropy, which figures as a central Christian virtue. Much of the Epitome is devoted to a detailed explanation of this category and its distinction from other virtues. In the original, the ethics of philanthropy is opposed to the astrological ideology represented by Clement’s father Faust. Faust's views are based on the natural philosophical ideas of the early Greek Stoics. Apostle Peter, Clement's teacher, responds to his arguments from the standpoint of Judeo-Christian monotheism, referring to the biblical history of his people. Thus, Hellenism is confronted with biblical monotheism. So, Epitome appears a kind of argument in the controversy between Gentile Christians and Judeo-Christians, which has troubled the Syrian Church for centuries. However, in translation, this clash of worldviews remains obscured, as the translator does not seem to recognize either the terminology of Stoic natural philosophy, or astrological issues, or the debate between the traditions of Peter and Paul in Syria. Thus, all the Stoic terminology of Faust is reduced to a single concept of "being". Therefore, in the translated version, the controversy is not so much between Christianity and astrology, as between ethics and "ontology". Instead, the translator enriches the philosophical outline of the work with polysemic Slavic vocabulary, which sheds new light on the role of the bishop in Peter’s instructions to Clement. Comparison of the Greek and Slavic versions of the Epitome – an autobiography attributed to St. Clement – with his only authentic work, 1Corinthians, allowed to draw another unexpected conclusion. All these works are not only devoted to one main problem - the restoration of peace in the controversial Christian community, but also offer similar ways out of the crisis through brotherly love, solidarity and respect for the otherness of the fellow Christians. This may indicate either that the author of the Syrian apocrypha was inspired by the true Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians, or that the image of St. Clement, that developed in the early tradition, dictated the message of the pseudo-epigraph quite powerfully. Due to this consonance, the apocryphal work of the Syrian Ebionites did to some extent acquaint Slavic readers with the ideas of Clement of Rome, whose only authentic work was almost unknown in the Middle Ages. (shrink)

Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can let us down badly. And the ways we love are often quite different to the romantic ideals society foists upon us. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, wouldn't we be better off without it? No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of (...) love, one that recognizes that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. What Jenkins calls "sad love" offers no bogus "happy ever afters." Rather, it tries to find a way properly to integrate heartbreak and disappointment into the lived experience of love"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

To speak of democracy is often to speak less of a fact than of a hope. In his introduction to Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville admitted that ‘… in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress’. De Tocqueville recognised that democracy's success would rely on its constant promotion, the (...) affirmation and revaluation of its terms and conditions, such that it sustains the investedness of its (voluntary) participants. This paper considers the work of Stanley Cavell as inheriting the tone of de Tocqueville's romantic will to democracy, particularly in the discovery of its analogous image in ‘remarriage comedy’. I look first at the ways in which popular pictures of (in this case, American) democracy on film sustain an expression of hope for a better set of relations amongst equal and consenting participants, an expression that is identified as romantic in nature. By contrast, I will also discuss how representations of democracy's reality on screen—pictures that sit outside comfortable generic expectations, and reveal those moments in which interest in democratic participation or values has ebbed or is dormant—have as much to tell us about democracy's character as more idealist expressions of what it might be or become. (shrink)

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Volume 52, Issue 5, Page 299-305, September 2022. This is a commentary on William Lynch’s Minority Report, which is a synthesis of the last 75 years of STS writings with philosophical themes from Lakatos, Feyerabend, and others. The comment questions the continued relevance of older ideas of scientific opinion which rested on the supposed autonomy of scientists in the face of the present grant system and the bureaucracy of peer review. The magnitude of the (...) funding of science, and its apparent biases, call the whole of the inherited view of science into question. (shrink)

Films depicting educational relationships typically emphasize personal connections between students and teachers over the educational goals that such relations facilitate. In doing so, these films raise the question of how teachers stand in relation to their institutional roles in such a way as to inspire students’ desires for knowledge. In this paper, in order to examine the influence of institutional roles in defining teacher–student relationships, we analyze “The Paper Chase,” a film in which teacher and student have no personal connection (...) but in which the drama of student desire is nonetheless clearly featured. Drawing from Plato’s erotics, in which the soul is shaped by desire for that which it lacks, and from Jacques Lacan’s theories of desire and transference, we argue that “The Paper Chase” portrays educational desire as rooted in the differential of authority between teacher and student. (shrink)

STANLEY CAVELL’s The Claim of Reason is two books in one. The first, was drafted some twenty years ago, whereas the second was written quite recently. Most of the first book is about epistemology, and this is the book with which I want to take issue. So I shall spend most of my space on it, saying only a little about the second. This is unfortunate, since I admire the second book even more than I disagree with the first. But (...) one always has more to say in disagreement than in agreement. (shrink)

In this article, the Bild or image of the sculptor used by Plotinus and adapted by his Christian follower Meister Eckhart forms the basis of a reflection on the religious or otherworldly dimension in ethics and on the relationship of esthetics, morality, and religion. The image of the sculptor who chips away at his sculpture exemplifies the relationship of the individual to its divine archetype. Such knowledge involves transformation of the knower, a turning back of the image to the archetype, (...) a shaping of the self that emerges from recognition of its true identity and vocation. This constitutes the dynamic dimension of Bildung in Eckhart as educere, a leading forth from attachment to particular things and a purification and reformation of the self according to its true image. The turning back is thereby a turning within to the supreme Good, the nobility and the purity of the Divine nature, which is the origin of the true self and its intrinsic dignity as image of its transcendent source. (shrink)

Civilization, rather than being an alternative to the state of nature, is instead its efficient form. The instruments and institutions of civilization—economic and political structure, law, culture, religion, war, etc.—are manifestations of humankind’s genetic predispositions toward cooperation and reason. The fabric of civilization comprises behaviors and institutions that coalesce around core beliefs that need not be objectively true. The principal cost of civilization is defined by the social obligations that individuals are compelled to incur, and the opportunities for private benefit (...) that they are compelled to forego, all for the sake of maintaining an optimal degree of civil unity and trust. Disputes about these costs give rise to culture wars, civil wars, and clashes between civilizations. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantics of tense and aspect in Romance languages. Its goal is to develop a compositional, model-theoretic semantics for tense and temporal adverbs which is sensitive to aspectual distinctions. I will consider durative adverbial distributions and aspectual contrasts across different morphological tense forms. I will examine tense selection under habitual meanings, generic meanings and state of result constructions. In order to account for these facts I will argue that temporal homogeneity plays a fundamental role in tense (...) selection in Romance languages. (shrink)