Aristotle’s several accounts of the praiseworthy mean temperament of nemesis, one in the Nichomachean Ethics and two in the Eudemian Ethics, do not cohere with each other, and each account is internally flawed. Some philosophers have pronounced Aristotle’s accounts of nemesis as a mean to be irreparably defective and even a misapplication of the doctrine of the mean. Contrary to such pronouncements, Aristotle’s accounts of nemesis as a mean have explicable reparable flaws, and can be brought into coherence. The tools (...) for repair are provided by an interpretation and elaboration of Aristotle’s discussion, in the Rhetoric, of emotions and temperaments contrary to pity. Ultimately, nemesis as a praiseworthy mean temperament is constituted by and accounted for in terms of four praiseworthy sub-temperaments, namely proper indignation, proper Schadenfreude, proper pity, and proper gratulation. (shrink)

Aristotle’s several accounts of the praiseworthy mean temperament of nemesis, one in the Nichomachean Ethics and two in the Eudemian Ethics, do not cohere with each other, and each account is internally flawed. Some philosophers have pronounced Aristotle’s accounts of nemesis as a mean to be irreparably defective and even a misapplication of the doctrine of the mean. Contrary to such pronouncements, Aristotle’s accounts of nemesis as a mean have explicable reparable flaws, and can be brought into coherence. The tools (...) for repair are provided by an interpretation and elaboration of Aristotle’s discussion, in the Rhetoric, of emotions and temperaments contrary to pity. Ultimately, nemesis as a praiseworthy mean temperament is constituted by and accounted for in terms of four praiseworthy sub-temperaments, namely proper indignation, proper Schadenfreude, proper pity, and proper gratulation. (shrink)

My project is to defend and further develop Schacht's interpretation of Nietzsche on perspectivism and to challenge Clark's and Leiter's interpretations.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Topics of Deconstruction: An Overview The Deconstruction of Structuralism The Deconstruction of Phenomenology Supplementarity in the Deconstruction of Rousseau The Deconstruction of Heidegger Deconstructive Remarks about Hegel The Deconstruction of Khōra Responding to Deconstructions Radical Meaning Holism: Rorty and Derrida Deconstruction and Questions of Ethics: Hospitality, Justice, and Friendship.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Preface 1. Fighting Terrorism 1:1. A new Discourse on War? 1:2. Richard Rorty and the Ethics of War 2. Etiquettes of Atrocity 2:1. Etiquettes of Atrocity 2:2. Discourses on War 2:3. Keeping the discourse: the United States and Vietnam 2.4. Carl Schmitt and the theory of the Partisan 3. Changing the Discourse 3:1 Germany and the Eastern Front 1941-5 3:2 France and Algeria 1955-8 3:3 Israel and the Intifada 3:4 Conclusion 4. A New Discourse? 4:1. The War on Terror -- (...) Is it a War? 4:2. Excluding Unlawful Combatants 4:3. Network Warfare 4:4. Networked Ethics 5. Grammars of Killing 5:1 Grammars of Killing 5:2 Respecting our enemies 5: 3 Non-Lethal Weapons 6. The Unconditional Imperative 6:1 Jaspers and the Warrior Ethos 6:2 The Micromanagement of the Battlefield 6:3 Corporate Warriors? 6:4 Asimov's Children 7. Back to the Greeks 7:1 Back to the Greeks? 7:2 Simone Weil and The Iliad 7:3 Thucydides and the Melian Dialogue 7:4 What's he to Hecuba? 8 The Heuristics of Fear. (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.

Coercion, the act of compelling someone to do something by the use of power, intimidation, or threats, has been deemed a necessary weapon in the public health armamentarium since before public health fell under the remit of physicians and out of the grip of “sanitarians” and civil engineers. This article examines the ethics of detention in the pursuit of public health and uses a contemporary example, detention of poorly compliant individuals with tuberculosis, to highlight the moral dilemmas posed, and examine (...) whether recently proposed approaches are just. In particular I focus upon the public health response to non-infectious individuals who fail to comply with treatment . Our response to them helps clarify contemporary attitudes to recalcitrant, often marginalised, individuals who pose an uncertain threat.Globally tuberculosis control is failing. The World Health Organisation recently called this public health threat a global emergency.1 Transmission occurs through often casual contact from individuals who have pulmonary disease. Although there is much that is uncertain regarding the infectiousness of this ancient disease, we do know that those who are smear-positive, that is who have organisms of Mycobacterium tuberculosis visible in stained respiratory secretions, are considerably more infectious than those who do not.2, 3 Compliance with effective treatment rapidly makes previously infectious patients non-infectious. Standard treatment for fully drug-sensitive tuberculosis usually lasts for six months. Erratic adherence to chemotherapy, however, may result in relapse and the development of drug-resistant disease which is considerably more difficult to treat.In the 1980s and early 1990s New York City witnessed an epidemic of tuberculosis and, of particular concern, a marked increase in drug-resistant and multidrug-resistant strains. In the early 1990s the threat of a virtually untreatable, casually communicable, …. (shrink)

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)

This paper applies a Ricœurian ethics in a two-fold personal/societal critique, choosing as a case study the representation of an “other” in a newspaper article. The personal critique uses a historical narrative as a window. Through it, we see hysterical stories about national enemies—in this case the Greek Cypriots—imposing themselves upon the developing consciousness of a growing child. I describe my awakening—through Ricœur’s idea of the creativity of language—from the spell of these dominant normative national narratives to the possibility of (...) re-reading them creatively. Ricœur’s blueprint for engagement with such narrative structures holds out the promise of reading them in an ethical manner, and this is achievable through his linguistic hospitality. From there, this study, analyzing the ethical predicaments of mainstream journalism from the perspective of critical media studies, problematizes the issue of otherness in the news. The example taken up, a current Turkish newspaper article covering a Turkish Cypriot Parliamentarian’s remarks in session regarding the experiences of 1974 Cyprus, reveals how this otherization is actually constructed under the name of the journalistic profession. This essay then borrows a Ricœurian ethical perspective with a view to making news language more hospitable, repositioning both news organizations and news items alike within Ricœur’s ethical paradigm of leading a good life with and for others within just institutions. This conceptualization of the news item itself as a just institution is a change that journalists could make in order to bring the news more in line with a Ricœurian sense of ethics and away from the current dominant practices in mainstream journalism. (shrink)

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)

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)

While cancer rates continue to increase, therapy has dramatically decreased the mortality rates. The increased efficacy of current therapies may unfortunately have profound toxic effects on gamete function in both adolescent and reproductive age groups, with infertility as an expected consequence of cancer therapy. Significant progress in the advancement of fertility preservation therapies provides realistic options for future fertility in cancer survivors. However, a number of challenging issues need to be considered when presenting fertility preservation options. This overview highlights some (...) of these considerations including religious-cultural-ethical values, access to care and cost of services, developmental capacity and consent, and posthumous reproduction. (shrink)

Cancer rates in men and women of reproductive age have continued to increase in recent years; however, therapy has dramatically decreased the mortality rates. Since 1990, the prevalence of cancer survivors in young adults increased from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 250 patients due to more aggressive therapies. Current therapies may have profound toxic effects on gamete function with infertility as an expected consequence of cancer therapy. Depending on the site and stage of cancer, age of the patient, and (...) the type of treatment, approximately 90% of men and women diagnosed with cancer may be at risk of permanent infertility.Fertility preservation has emerged as a discipline dedicated to improving the future reproductive potential of cancer survivors. Significant progress in the advancement of fertility preservation therapies and a heightened awareness of the availability of therapies has occurred in the past 10 years. The American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Society of Reproductive Medicine have advanced these efforts by formally recognizing the importance of fertility awareness. (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.

Knowledge and Lotteries is organized around an epistemological puzzle: in many cases, we seem consistently inclined to deny that we know a certain class of propositions, while crediting ourselves with knowledge of propositions that imply them. In its starkest form, the puzzle is this: we do not think we know that a given lottery ticket will be a loser, yet we normally count ourselves as knowing all sorts of ordinary things that entail that its holder will not suddenly acquire a (...) large fortune. After providing a number of specific and general characterizations of the puzzle, Hawthorne carefully examines the competing merits of candidate solutions. In so doing, he explores a number of central questions concerning the nature and importance of knowledge, including the relationship of knowledge to assertion and practical reasoning, the status of epistemic closure principles, the merits of various brands of scepticism, the prospects for a contextualist account of knowledge, and the potential for other sorts of salience-sensitive accounts. Along the way, he offers a careful treatment of pertinent issues at the foundations of semantics. His book will be of interest to anyone working in the field of epistemology, as well as to philosophers of language. (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 ...

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.

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)

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)

Ed. Daniel Greenberger, 750pp May 1995 164.95.

_Confronting American Labor_ traces the development of the American left, from the Depression era through the Cold War, by examining four representative intellectuals who grappled with the difficult question of labor’s role in society. Since the time of Marx, leftists have raised over and over the question of how an intelligentsia might participate in a movement carried out by the working class. Their modus operandi was to champion those who suffered injustice at the hands of the powerful. From the late (...) nineteenth through much of the twentieth century, this meant a focus on the industrial worker. The Great Depression was a time of remarkable consensus among leftist intellectuals, who often interpreted worker militancy as the harbinger of impending radical change. While most Americans waited out the crisis, listening to the assurances of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Marxian left was convinced that the crisis was systemic. Intellectuals who came of age during the Depression developed the view that the labor movement in America was to be the organizing base for a proletariat. Moreover, many came from working-class backgrounds that contributed to their support of labor. World War II and the resultant economic recovery shattered this coherence on the left. How did radicals opposed to capitalism deal with a labor movement that was very successful in terms of membership and power but clearly capitalist in its orientation? Coker describes the marked ambivalence and confusion of the intellectual left in the postwar years—a period of frustration brought on by a misreading of labor militancy during the 1930s and an unsuccessful search for a radical proletarian movement. The result was a politically and intellectually weakened left for decades to come. C_onfronting American Labor_ examines four individuals who represent a cross section of postwar radicalism. Each came of age on the socialist left, expecting that an anticapitalist movement would emerge from the ranks of labor. Seymour Martin Lipset and C. Wright Mills were professional sociologists. Sidney Lens spent his early life working within the labor movement before becoming a political commentator for a variety of leftist magazines and journals in the postwar era. Historian Herbert Gutman helped to create a “new labor history” that reflected broader transformations within the intellectual left. In tracing their various approaches to the problem of labor, C_onfronting American Labor_ explores the diverse nature of the postwar left. This important work will be of value to anyone interested in labor, class, and American thought. (shrink)

Throughout history, war seems to have had an iron grip on humanity. In this short book, internationally renowned philosopher of war, Christopher Coker, challenges the view that war is an idea that we can cash in for an even better one - peace. War, he argues, is central to the human condition; it is part of the evolutionary inheritance which has allowed us to survive and thrive. New technologies and new geopolitical battles may transform the face and purpose of (...) war in the 21st century, but our capacity for war remains undiminished. The inconvenient truth is that we will not see the end of war until it exhausts its own evolutionary possibilities. (shrink)

In this pioneering book renowned political philosopher Christopher Coker looks in-depth at two countries that now claim this title: Xi Jinping's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia. He also discusses the Islamic caliphate, a virtual and aspirational civilizational state that is unlikely to fade despite the recent setbacks suffered by ISIS. The civilizational state, he contends, is an idea whose time has come.

It is tempting to posit an intimate relationship between belief and assertion. The speech act of assertion seems like a way of transferring the speaker’s belief to his or her audience. If this is right, then you might think that the evidential warrant required for asserting a proposition is just the same as the warrant for believing it. We call this thesis entitlement equality. We argue here that entitlement equality is false, because our everyday notion of belief is unambiguously a (...) weak one. Believing something is true, we argue, is compatible with having relatively little confidence in it. Asserting something requires something closer to complete confidence. Specifically, we argue that believing a proposition merely requires thinking it likely, but that thinking that a proposition is likely does not entitle one to assert it. This conclusion conflict with a standard view that ‘full belief’ is the central commonsense non-factive attitude. (shrink)

This book explores the ethical implications of war in the contemporary world. The author, a leading theorist of warfare, explains why it is of crucial importance that Western countries should continue to apply traditional ethical rules and practices in war, even when engaging with international terrorist groups. The book uses the work of the late American philosopher Richard Rorty to explain the need to make ethical rules central to the conduct of military operations. Arguing that the question of ethics was (...) re-opened by the 'War on Terror', the book then examines America's post-9/11 redefinition of its own prevailing discourse of war. It ends with a discussion of other key challenges to the ethics of war, such as the rise of private security companies and the use of robots in war. In exploring these issues, this book seeks to place ethics at the centre of debates about the conduct of future warfare. This book will be of great interest to all students of military ethics, war studies, military history and strategic studies in general, and to military colleges in particular. (shrink)

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)

The issue of detention as a public health control measure has attracted attention recently. This is because the threat of strains of tuberculosis that are resistant to a wider range of drugs has been identified, and there is renewed concern that public health is threatened. This paper considers whether involuntary detention is justified where voluntary measures have failed or where a patient poses a danger, albeit uncertain, to the public. We discuss the need for strengthening evidence-based assessments of public health (...) risk and suggest that we should refect more profoundly on the philosophical foundations upon which our policies and practices are grounded. (shrink)

This essay will postulate that Adam Smith's view of society was formulated out of historical influences far broader than generally conceded by many commentators in economic thought. Smith's basic behavioral concepts of sympathy and self-interest are significant contributions to economic thought as are his philosophy of human nature being based on liberty and freedom and not simply the creation of wealth. The vectors of influence that converged on Adam Smith were of varied and even contradictory natures. Yet the result of (...) this collision of philosophical forces was clearly an event of significance in the history of philosophical and economic thought. (shrink)

Price discrimination is widely considered unethical/unfair by consumers, as has been borne out by decades of psychological research and mainstream press reporting. However, little academic work has been done to investigate the ethics of price discrimination. The work that has been done to date concludes that while price discrimination is not unethical, despite widespread lay perceptions, it is at best morally neutral. We argue price discrimination ismoreethical than unitary pricing, when done ‘progressively,’ meaning firms charge customers as a function of (...) their willingness-to-pay. We introduce this specific kind of price discrimination as ‘Progressive Pricing’ and demonstrate it ethically outperforms a ‘Unitary Pricing’ scheme (where everyone pays the same price, regardless of their willingness-to-pay), at least within a broadly consequentialist framework. We do this by comparing a Unitary Pricing scheme to a Progressive one, analyzing them through the lenses of four different consequentialist ‘Social Welfare Functions’ (Utilitarian, Egalitarian, Prioritarian, and Leximin), which are used by welfare economists and philosophers to rank the distributions of different social outcomes, concluding that Progressive Pricing is preferred regardless of which Social Welfare Function(s) one finds most plausible. (shrink)

The issue of detention as a tuberculosis control measure has resurfaced following the prolonged detention of a patient with an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis in a prison cell in Arizona, and the attempted detention in Italy and subsequent detention in Atlanta, Georgia of an American sufferer thought to have XDR-TB in May 2007. These cases have reignited the debate over the evidence that supports detention policy in the control of tuberculosis, and its associated legal and ethical ramifications. This paper (...) considers whether involuntary detention is justified where voluntary measures have failed or where a patient poses a danger, albeit uncertain, to the public, and discusses the need for strengthening evidencebased assessments of public health risk. (shrink)

We present several new studies focusing on “salience effects”—the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge to someone when an unrealized possibility of error has been made salient in a given conversational context. These studies suggest a complicated picture of epistemic universalism: there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters vary in such a way that epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositional content, can display patterns of genuine cross-cultural diversity.

In this 1976 volume, Professor Ziman paints a broad picture of science, and of its relations to the world in general. He sets the scene by the historical development of scientific research as a profession, the growth of scientific technologies out of the useful arts, the sources of invention and technical innovation, and the advent of Big Science. He then discusses the economics of research and development, the connections between science and war, the nature of science policy and the moral (...) dilemmas of social responsibility in science. Each topic is introduced by reference to easily understandable particular examples, with a large number of illustrations chosen to bring out the concreteness and reality of science as a human activity. Professor Ziman gives a chapter-by-chapter list of suggested topics for oral and written discussion, intended to provoke critical, sceptical attitudes to simplified solutions to real issues, and comments briefly on relevant books and other sources. (shrink)

A brief account of educational aims, focussing on preparation for a life of autonomous well-being.