Reflections on contemporary national and global change, including its implications for marginalisation, are developed through an appreciation of Manchester as a fulcrum of such processes, and in critical conversation with Ronald Preston's social theology. The reflections also suggest key features of a contemporary public theology. These are elaborated in the second part of the article with references to an emerging substantive public theology agenda through reflections on a bias for inclusivity, the nature of the human, and the procedures for religious (...) interventions in the public square. The article concludes with a brief consideration of Manchester's central role in developing such a public theology, and the latter's emerging character as promoting connections. (shrink)

These essays explore the religious dimensions to a number of key features of well-being, including marriage, crime and rehabilitation, work, inequality, mental ...

A mugging can overwhelm our ability to apply moral principles. When words fail, we still need advice that allows us to remain moral in the face of an attack. Self-defense offers just such advice and can be supported by utilitarian, deontological, and virtue approaches to ethics. Self-defense increases safety and security that enhance our freedom and well-being, which, in turn, allow us to survive and flourish as moral agents. Self-defense must, however, itself be qualified because its violent treatment of muggers (...) may produce human time bombs that reduce the safety and security of society.The martial art of Aikido trains our hand to act morally in the face of a physical attack when our mind is otherwise occupied. Aikido teaches self-defense, but it goes beyond self-centeredness to also protect the attacker. Such concern helps build community because it reduces vectors of resentment that spread when violence is perpetuated. The defense-only nature of Aikido teaches virtues in an embodied form on the mat. It offers philosophers an experiential and kinesthetic view of moral conduct that supplements and complements an exclusively intellectual approach. Moral philosophy cannot demand that we learn a martial art since it is only one of many possibilities to assist us in living a moral life; nevertheless, a reasonable attention to those conditions necessary for freedom and well-being entails an awareness of self-defense. (shrink)

John Kinsella’s three-volume Graphology Poems: 1995–2015 constitutes a major and shifting set of poetic statements. Partly a discontinuous poetic chronicle of life in Western Australia’s Avon Valley, they are also an investigation of ways in which an activist poetry may inscribe aspects of being, self and experience while protesting against environmental challenges and degradation. As these poems sprawl in many directions and express overlapping preoccupations, and as they emphasise the unsettled and unstable while affirming what has a continuing importance, (...) so they constitute a series of ethical positions connected to living sustainably and responsibly. They also explore the porous nature of a poetic activism that steps out into the quotidian world while simultaneously refashioning the poetic, challenging and even subverting the language of the contemporary lyric and the contemporary pastoral. The Graphology poems prize incompleteness and the fragmentary, open out to reveal absences and imply other texts, value multiple meanings and represent many of the most important strands of Kinsella’s work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cambridge Companion to the StoicsJohn SellarsBrad Inwood, editor. The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 438. Cloth, $70.00. Paper, $26.00.No doubt everyone will be familiar with the format and rationale of the Cambridge Companion series, each volume being designed to function as a "reference work for students and nonspecialists." Brad Inwood's Cambridge Companion to The Stoics follows the usual (...) plan, offering fifteen essays by an impressive line up of well-known Stoic scholars. The essays fall into four distinct groups. The first group (Sedley, Gill) offers a sketch of the history of the Stoa, and both essays are excellent. Of particular interest is Sedley's challenge to the traditional distinction between the orthodox "early" and eclectic "middle" Stoa (esp. 23-24). The second group (Hankinson, Bobzien, White, Algra, Frede, Brunschwig, Schofield, Brennan) forms the heart of the volume, each essay examining a central topic in Stoic philosophy. While all of these contributions are very good, those by Bobzien, Brunschwig, and Schofield stand out in particular. Hankinson offers a helpful discussion of Stoic epistemology but lapses into anachronistic descriptions at times; the Stoic position is "Lockean," the Stoics are good empiricists in the Humean fashion, they have "Leibnizian metaphysics" (63, 69). Brennan gives a very interesting discussion of Stoic moral psychology, but perhaps pitches it a little too high for a nonspecialist audience. The third group (Hankinson again, Blank and Atherton, Jones) explores the ancient Stoic tradition's relationship with medicine, grammar, and the astronomical sciences. Jones' discussion of the neglected Cleomedes is especially welcome (333-37). The final group (Irwin, Long) considers the reception of Stoic ideas in the Western intellectual tradition. Of these I found Long the more accessible and useful of the two (compare, for instance, their respective discussions of Butler, 357-62 and 382-89), although Irwin will no doubt prove stimulating to those already familiar with the issues he addresses.What is lacking from the collection as a whole, however, is any sense of the systematic unity of Stoic philosophy. While it has inevitably been divided up under various headings for the sake of exposition, there has not been much attempt to put it back together again (like Humpty Dumpty, Stoic philosophy is like an egg; Diogenes Laertius 7.40). Although many individual contributors signal the systematicity of Stoicism, there is no extended discussion of the way in which the various parts of Stoic philosophy fit together, nor how that system relates to the way in which the Stoics conceived philosophy, or their ideal of the Sage. [End Page 337]My principal concerns with the volume as a whole relate to the lack of any supporting material that might prove useful to the student or nonspecialist approaching the subject for the first time. There is no list or chronology of the principal Stoics, nor a guide to the ancient sources for Stoicism. There is a list of primary sources, but this contains all of the primary material cited by the contributors, including works by Aquinas, Butler, Duns Scotus, Hume, Leibniz, and Spinoza. There is no readily accessible table of abbreviations, and what nonspecialist will know that in order to find a text cited as 'S. E. M' they may end up opening a book entitled Against the Logicians (as 'M' 7 and 8 are called in the Loeb Classical Library series)? Some abbreviations are explained within the list of primary sources, but this is not immediately obvious. The bibliography is indeed substantial but it also simply lists the various items cited by the contributors. What might have been more useful in this companion is a structured guide to further reading, such as the one in A. S. McGrade's excellent Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, for instance. Even better would have been a bibliography along the lines of the one in Jonathan Barnes' Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. One other omission that is striking is the absence of a discussion of methodological problems that arise from relying on often hostile doxographical sources. Although a number of the contributors do touch on such issues en route, a more sustained treatment might have... (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

Reissued here in its corrected second edition of 1864, this essay by John Stuart Mill argues for a utilitarian theory of morality. Originally printed as a series of three articles in Fraser's Magazine in 1861, the work sought to refine the 'greatest happiness' principle that had been championed by Jeremy Bentham, defending it from common criticisms, and offering a justification of its validity. Following Bentham, Mill holds that actions can be judged as right or wrong depending on whether they (...) promote happiness or 'the reverse of happiness'. Although attracted by Bentham's consequentialist framework based on empirical evidence rather than intuition, Mill separates happiness into 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures, arguing for a weighted system of measurement when making and judging decisions. Dissected and debated since its first appearance, the essay is Mill's key discussion on the topic and remains a fundamental text in the study of ethics. (shrink)

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

In his preface Mr Wilson writes 'I feel that a great many adults … would do better to spend less time in simply accepting the concepts of others uncritically, and more time in learning how to analyse concepts in general'. Mr Wilson starts by describing the techniques of conceptual analysis. He then gives examples of them in action by composing answers to specific questions and by criticism of quoted passages of argument. Chapter 3 sums up the importance of this kind (...) of mental activity. Chapter 4 presents selections for the reader to analyse, followed by questions of university entrance/scholarship type. This is a book to be worked through, in a sense a text-book. (shrink)

What does reality encompass? Is it exclusively physical, or does it include mental and 'abstract' aspects? What are the elements of being, reality's raw materials? John Heil offers stimulating answers to these questions framed in terms of a comprehensive metaphysics of substances and properties inspired by Descartes, Locke, and their successors.

J.L. Mackie insists that ordinary evaluative thought presents itself as a matter of sensitivity to aspects of the world. And this phenomenological thesis seems correct. When one or another variety of philosophical non-cognitivism claims to capture the truth about what the experience of value is like, or (in a familiar surrogate for phenomenology) about what we mean by our evaluative language, the claim is never based on careful attention to the lived character of evaluative thought or discourse. The idea is, (...) rather, that the very concept of the cognitive or factual rules out the possibility of an undiluted representation of how things are, enjoying, nevertheless, the internal relation to 'attitudes' or the will that would be needed to count as evaluative. On this view the phenomenology of value would involve a mere incoherence, if it were as Mackie says--a possibility that then tends (naturally enough) not to be so much as entertained. But, as Mackie sees, there is no satisfactory justification for supposing that the factual is, by definition, attitudinatively and motivationally neutral. This clears away the only obstacle to accepting his phenomenological claim; and the upshot is that non-cognitivism must offer to correct the phenomenology of value, rather than give an account of it. -/- In Machie's view the correction is called for. In this paper I want to suggest that he attributes an unmerited plausibility to this thesis, by giving a false picture of what one is committed to if one resists it. (shrink)

Foreword I. Critical rationalism is a genuinely new philosophical perspective. It is not, however, one systematic view. The development of it by Popper and ...

I argue that incomprehensibility (what the ancient skeptics called acatalepsia) plays a central role in the skepticism of both Bayle and Hume. I challenge a commonly held view (recently argued by Todd Ryan) that Hume, unlike Bayle, does not present oppositions of reason--what Kant called antimonies.

Everyone loves something or somebody, and most people are concerned with loving another person like themselves, all equal. This book is based on the belief that getting clear about the concept and meaning of love between equals is essential for success in our practical lives. For how can we love properly unless we have a fairly clear idea of what love is? The book is written in ordinary language and for the ordinary person, without jargon or philosophical technicalities. It aims (...) to show that love between equals involves a single basic disposition, though that disposition expresses itself in various ways. Thus, after an introduction explaining the need for analysis and clarification, the author then deals in order with love as desire or need; with intrinsic friendship and sharing the self; with basic difficulties concerning power, dependence, altruism and paranoia; with sex and erotic love; and finally with the value in human life of love between equals. The work as a whole gives clear, coherent and practical guidance for all who wish to grasp what such love is really like. (shrink)

The introduction takes up the history and meaning of the term culture and concurs with Dawson’s holistic view that culture has both material and spiritualfoundations. What I call the incarnated character of culture as extensional from and expressive of human beings, taken as hylomorphic substances, then brings us to the overriding theme of the paper: the metaphysical structure of culture. What discloses itself, in this regard, is the accidentality of culture as a system of relational acts rooted in social reality. (...) Human society, in turn, is an accidental system of human substances in relation. Such substantial grounding of both society and culture will lead to the recognition that the human soul, through its substantial act or “esse,” manifests itself socially/culturally in the flesh. Culture is thereby the expression of the human soul. What then follows is a metaphysical investigation of why cultures live (this includes focuses on Aquinas, Eliade, Pieper) and why they die (focuses include Spengler, Schweitzer, Voegelin). The conclusion touches on the restoration of culture. (shrink)

Presents a concise and comprehensive analysis of George Berkeley’s thought and the impact of his intellectual contributions to philosophy In this latest addition to the Blackwell Great Minds series, noted scholar of early modern philosophy Margaret Atherton examines Berkeley’s most influential work and demonstrates the significant conceptual impact of his ideas in metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. A concise and rigorous primer on Berkeley’s essential writings and contributions to modern philosophy Written by a leading scholar of early modern (...) philosophy Offers insight into the foundations of modern metaphysical and religious philosophy Equips readers to find firm footing in Berkeley’s wider body of published work in the canon of Western philosophy. (shrink)

Ed. Daniel Greenberger, 750pp May 1995 164.95.

John Webster provides a major scholarly analysis, the first in any language, of the final sections of the Church Dogmatics. He focuses on the theme of human agency in Barth's late ethics and doctrine of baptism, placing the discussion in the context of an interpretation of the Dogmatics as an intrinsically ethical dogmatics. The first two chapters survey the themes of agency, covenant and human reality in the Dogmatics as a whole; later chapters give a thorough analysis of Church (...) Dogmatics IV/4 and the posthumously published text The Christian Life. A final chapter examines the significance of Barth's work for contemporary accounts of moral selfhood. The book is important not only for a detailed analysis of a neglected part of Barth's oeuvre, but also because it casts into question much of what has hitherto been written about Barth's ethical dogmatics. (shrink)

An invaluable complement to the standards works in early modern philosophy, this anthology introduces an important selection from the largely unknown writings of women philosophers of the early modern period. Readings comment on major works of the period and are easily integrated into courses in the history of modern philosophy. Included are letters to prominent philosophers, philosophical tracts arguing a particular view, and comments on controversies of the day. Each section is prefaced by a headnote giving a biographical account of (...) its author and setting the piece in historical context. Atherton's introduction provides a solid framework for assessing these works and their place in modern philosophy. -- from back cover. (shrink)