Mary Wollstonecraft’s visionary treatise, originally published in 1792, was the first book to present women’s rights as an issue of universal human rights. Ideal for coursework and classroom study, this comprehensive edition of Wollstonecraft’s heartfelt feminist argument includes illuminating essays by leading scholars that highlight the author’s significant contributions to modern political philosophy, making a powerful case for her as one of the most substantive political thinkers of the Enlightenment era. No other scholarly work to date has examined as (...) closely both the ideological moorings and the enduring legacy of Wollstonecraft’s groundbreaking and courageous discourse. (shrink)

The significance of Friedrich Nietzsche for twentieth century culture is now no longer a matter of dispute. He was quite simply one of the most influential of modern thinkers. The opening essay of this 1996 Companion provides a chronologically organised introduction to and summary of Nietzsche's published works, while also providing an overview of their basic themes and concerns. It is followed by three essays on the appropriation and misappropriation of his writings, and a group of essays exploring the nature (...) of Nietzsche's philosophy and its relation to the modern and post-modern world. The final contributions consider Nietzsche's influence on the twentieth century in Europe, the USA, and Asia. New readers and non-specialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Nietzsche currently available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Nietzsche. (shrink)

From about the fourth to the tenth century Buddhist monks in China engaged in formal, semi-public, religious disputation. I describe the Indian origins of this disputation and outline its settings, procedures, and functions. I then propose that this disputation put its participants at risk of performative contradiction with Buddhist tenets about language and salvation, and I illustrate how some chinese Buddhists attempted to transcend these contradictions, subverting disputation through creative linguistic and extra- linguistic strategies.

Humanistic Management and Transformative Service Research literatures share the common goal of addressing the increasingly growing global challenges faced by humanity. Recently, organizations have been called to further engage in social innovation in service in an attempt to address these challenges. However, the existing service literature does not offer explicit processes regarding how to manage these social innovation efforts at the human interaction level. By drawing on both Humanistic Management and Service literatures, this paper develops a conceptual framework to guide (...) the social innovation in service efforts. More specifically, this paper aims to answer a key question of: how can organizations manage human interactions to help maximize social innovation in service outcomes? This paper identifies four foundational values that should be at the core of the proposed processes needed in order to achieve the desired outcomes of SIS. Subsequently, a typology of service organizations is offered with different combinations of processes at the human interaction level, highlighting the synergistic effect of the three identified processes. The proposed framework in this paper is a first step in bridging two disciplines to highlight their potential and role in addressing the global challenges. (shrink)

Weak particularism about reasons is the view that the normative valency of some descriptive considerations varies, while others have an invariant normative valency. A defence of this view needs to respond to arguments that a consideration cannot count in favour of any action unless it counts in favour of every action. But it cannot resort to a global holism about reasons, if it claims that there are some examples of invariant valency. This paper argues for weak particularism, and presents a (...) framework for understanding the relationships between practical reasons. A central part of this framework is the idea that there is an important kind of reason-a 'presumptive reason'-which need not be conclusive, but which is neither pro tanto nor prima facie. /// [Richard Holton] Should particularists about ethics claim that moral principles are never true? Or should they rather claim that any finite set of principles will not be sufficient to capture ethics? This paper explores and defends the possibility of embracing the second of these claims whilst rejecting the first, a position termed 'principled particularism'. The main argument that particularists present for their position-the argument that holds that any moral conclusion can be superseded by further considerations-is quite compatible with principled particularism; indeed, it is compatible with the idea that every true moral conclusion can be shown to follow deductively from a finite set of premises. Whilst it is true that these premises must contain implicit ceteris paribus clauses, this does not render the arguments trivial. On the contrary, they can do important work in justifying moral conclusions. Finally the approach is briefly applied to the related field of jurisprudence. (shrink)

This selection consists of extracts from writings of women concerned solely with the pursuit of abstract ideas, historically contextualized. The texts, for the most part, reflect issues widely debated in their contemporary societies. Extracts from lesser-known writers are also included, providing a diversity of arguments spanning four centuries and including some notable contemporary philosophers.

A leader in the modern commentary on ethics and philosophy, Mary Warnock casts a critical eye over her life and times.

At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York concluded that: "Both sides in the arms race are... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation.".

This paper argues that it is morally wrong for the affluent not to contribute money or time to famine relief. It begins by endorsing an important methodological line of objection against the most prominent philosophical advocate of this claim, Peter Singer. This objection attacks his strategy of invoking a principle the acceptability of which is apparently based upon its conformity with "intuitive" moral judgements in order to defend a strongly counterintuitive conclusion. However, what follows is an argument for that counterintuitive (...) conclusion which claims to circumvent the methodological objection, and moreover without having to resort to a justificational ethical theory. How can this be done? Merely by appealing, it is maintained, to the simple practical considerations which are characteristic of the virtues of kindness and justice. Accordingly, an account of those virtues, outlining the structure of the practical reasoning of their possessors, occupies a central place in the argument. The paper displays the resources for normative argument of a "virtue ethics;" but it claims also that its conclusion cannot be escaped by the adherents of any plausible moral outlook. And this yields a further conclusion. All moral outlooks, and not only those which equate the moral point of view with the impartial point of view, face a "problem of demandingness" - for it seems to be a corollary of the argument that if one is to be living a life which is not immoral, one is precluded from pursuing practically any source of personal satisfaction. (shrink)

How is hope to be found amid the ethical and political dilemmas of modern life? Writer and philosopher Mary Zournazi brought her questions to some of the most thoughtful intellectuals at work today. She discusses "joyful revolt" with Julia Kristeva, the idea of "the rest of the world" with Gayatri Spivak, the "art of living" with Michel Serres, the "carnival of the senses" with Michael Taussig, the relation of hope to passion and to politics with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto (...) Laclau. A dozen stimulating minds weigh in with their visions of a better social and political order. The result is a collaboration - of writing, of thinking, and of politics - that demonstrates more clearly than any single-authored project could how ideas encountering one another can produce the vision needed for social change. (shrink)

It is often argued that cosmopolitanism faces unique motivational constraints, asking more of individuals than they are able to give. This ‘motivational problem’ is held to pose a significant challenge to cosmopolitanism, as it appears unable to transform its moral demands into motivated political action. This article develops a novel response to the motivational problem facing cosmopolitanism, arguing that self-interest, alongside appeals to sentiment, can play a vital and neglected, transitional role in moving towards an expanded cosmopolitical condition. The article (...) explicates the ‘motivational problem’, analyses the relationship between self-interest and sentimental cosmopolitanism in addressing it, and develops a series of claims that self-interest can be one important component in what we label as ‘transitional cosmopolitanism’. In doing so, we argue that self-interested motivations can be compatible with sentiment-based approaches, rendering them more plausible. In addition, two expected critiques of self-interested ‘transitional cosmopolitanism’ are tackled: (A) That it cannot address feasibility constraints, and (B) That self-interested motivations cannot meet what an ‘authentic’ cosmopolitanism entails. We refute and challenge these critiques and outline three conditions in which self-interest can advance a transitional form of cosmopolitanism, while also being compatible with cosmopolitanism writ large. (shrink)

The world is becoming deeply interconnected, whereby actions in one part of the world can have profound repercussions elsewhere. In a world of overlapping communities of fate, there has been a renewed enthusiasm for thinking about what it is that human beings have in common, and to explore the ethical basis of this. This has led to a renewed interest in examining the normative principles that might underpin efforts to resolve global collective action problems and to ameliorate serious global risks. (...) This project can be referred to as the project of cosmopolitanism. In response to this renewed cosmopolitan enthusiasm, this volume has brought together 25 seminal essays in the development of cosmopolitan thought by some of the world's most distinguished cosmopolitan thinkers and critics. It is divided into six sections: classical cosmopolitanism, global justice, culture and cosmopolitanism, political cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan global governance and critical examinations. This volume thus provides a thorough and extensive introduction to contemporary cosmopolitan thought and acts as a definitive source for those interested in cosmopolitan thinking and its critics. See also David Held's _Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities_. (shrink)

All religion and much philosophy has been concerned with the contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal. Human beings have always sought ways to overcome time, and to prove that death is not the end. This book consists then in an exploration of certain closely related ideas: personal identity, time, history and our commitment to the future, and the role of imagination in life.

Edwards’s views on the nature of the human will demonstrate his unique ability to unite philosophical rigor and theological fervor. Edwards was a staunch defender of the Reformed doctrines of absolute divine sovereignty and meticulous providence, but he was also a proponent of the intellectual tools and methods of early modern philosophy (and of John Locke in particular). His ultimate statement of his doctrinal position, Freedom of the Will, is the masterful result of these dual commitments.

En este libro, la autora desarrolla su concepción del juicio reflexionante inspirada en Emmanuel Kant y en Hannah Arendt para concentrarse en cómo cierto tipo de narraciones modelan nuestras nociones de lo que consideramos moral. Lara nos ofrece distintas concepciones sobre el mal en su formulación histórica mediante los ejemplos de las tragedias griegas, las diferentes concepciones sobre el mal en la obra de Shakespeare, el uso literario de la metáfora en la obra de Joseph Conrad y en narraciones fílmicas (...) que describen la crueldad humana. Lara sugiere que el aprendizaje moral es un proceso en el que intervienen las instituciones sociales, la voluntad de los individuos y de las sociedades para comprometerse a un debate abierto y con ello modelar los juicios colectivos sobre el pasado. Lara enfatiza que el juicio reflexionante se da entre un evento, una narración de dicho evento y la recepción pública de dicha narrativa. En este libro se aportan importantes métodos para la comprensión del fenómeno moral del mal, porque introducen nuevas verdades desvelatorias acerca de eventos particulares que no pueden ser simplemente captados por medio de categorías conceptuales. Lara utiliza como fuentes a Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben y Ariel Dorfman para probar la conclusión de este tipo de narraciones: la acción (de crueldad) ata de manera definitiva al perpetrador con su víctima. (shrink)

Fundamental principles : the nature of the dispute -- Types of euthanasia -- Psychiatric assisted suicide -- Neonates -- Incompetent adults -- Human life is sacred -- The slippery slope -- Medical views -- Four methods of easing death and their effect on doctors -- Looking further ahead.

Adam Smith sought to explain the persistence of slavery as an institution in Wealth of Nations and Lectures on Jurispridence. In order to accomplish this he also drew on arguments he had developed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. The result was a sophisticated explanation which bridged economic, psychological, and moral considerations. After presenting Smith’s explanation I will consider a discussion of the moral wrong of slavery in Ottobah Cugoano, the author of the incisive criticism of the slave trade Thoughts (...) and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787). I will suggest that Cugoano’s account of what is morally wrong in slavery shows an important lacuna in Smith‘s views. (shrink)

If the quasi-realist wants to earn the right to talk like a moral realist, he needs to be able to make sense of moral error. A special form of error—fundamental moral error—is often thought to be u...

Aristotle claims that in some extenuating circumstances, the correct response to the wrongdoer is sungnōmē rather than blame. Sungnōmē has a wide spectrum of meanings that include aspects of sympathy, pity, fellow-feeling, pardon, and excuse, but the dominant interpretation among scholars takes Aristotle’s meaning to correspond most closely to forgiveness. Thus, it is commonly held that the virtuous Aristotelian agent ought to forgive wrongdoers in specific extenuating circumstances. Against the more popular forgiveness interpretation, I begin by defending a positive account (...) of sungnōmē as the correct judgment that a wrongdoer deserves excuse since she was not blameworthy. I then argue that since sungnōmē is merited on the grounds of fairness, this shows that both the forgiveness interpretation and a third, alternative interpretation of sungnōmē as sympathy mischaracterize both the justification for sungnōmē and its nature. Moreover, I argue that Aristotle not only lacks an account of forgiveness but in fact, that his account of blame is incompatible with forgiveness altogether. (shrink)

The past six decades have seen rising interest in the philosophy of time, driven in large measure by the metaphysical implications of the physical theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Philosophical theology has only recently begun serious interaction with contemporary metaphysics of time. In particular, the issue of God's temporal mode of being has come under investigation In Part 1, I begin with the metaphysics of time, explicating and defending a causal account of dynamic time. I then consider objections that (...) can be brought against this account from the standpoint of the Special and General Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and conclude that one of the objections are compelling. In Part II, I consider the evidence from Scripture relative to God's temporal mode of being, and find that it is neutral between a temporal and an atemporal conception. The arguments upholding the medieval consensus in philosophical theology of divine timelessness are evaluated, along with contemporary arguments for atemporality. Openness to divine temporality is discernible in some medieval philosophers; their arguments, along with contemporary arguments for temporality, are investigated. I then offer an analysis of the concept of omnitemporality which I take to be the form of temporality most appropriate to expressing God's temporal mode of being. Finally I argue that objections to omnitemporality are not forceful, and that the concept has in its favor greater explanatory power for a range of issues in philosophical theology. (shrink)

This paper extends an ongoing discussion about establishing a sharper way to conduct ethical investigations into managerial virtue. It does so by relying on Alasdair MacIntyre's moral philosophy in place of those more dominant approaches taken by scholars who make up the field of positive social science. A connection is drawn herein between a MacIntyrean “narrative approach” to investigating managerial virtue and the idea of “work as a calling.” Specifically, it will be argued that the MacIntyrean‐influenced idea of “work as (...) a calling” provides a substantive moral vision that supports an understanding of how virtuous managers ought to narrate their primary workplace motivations. Ultimately, virtuous managers fulfill a “political calling” to support and sustain (a) good work, (b) the good of individual lives, and (c) the common good of communities that their organization reaches. To do this, they must rely on the “shepherd virtue” of practical wisdom (phronesis). Practical wisdom aids virtuous managers’ thinking about achieving the ends of their “calling” as well as any necessary course‐corrections that ought to be made toward the better achievement of those good and worthy ends. (shrink)

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early _Thoughts on the Education of Daughters_ to _The Female Reader_, a selection of texts for girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism—and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition. It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft’s great work came out of an (...) earlier and much shorter vindication—A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Editions in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft’s “other vindication.” It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index. (shrink)

Given that there is a forceful case for thinking that the affluent are morally required to devote a substantial proportion of what they have to helping the poor, Garrett Cullity examines, refines and defends an argument of this form. He then identifies its limits.

Philosophers have long disagreed about whether poetry, drama, and other literary arts are important to philosophy and among those who believe that they are important, explanations of that importance have differed greatly. This paper aims to explain and illustrate some of the reasons why Hume found literature to be an important topic for philosophy and philosophers. Philosophy, he holds, can help to explain general and specific literary phenomena, to ground the science of criticism, and to suggest and justify "principles of (...) art," while at the same time literature can provide valuable "experiments" for philosophical theorizing and provide it with a model for the science of morals and (in some ways) for philosophy itself. Moreover, the literary arts can not only help one to write better philosophy, in Hume's view they can also help one to write philosophy better. (shrink)

Nature and Mortality is a challenging look at some of the major public issues of our time through the eyes of one of our most influential and probing liberal humanists. It is a frank account on where we stand today on such controversial matters as human embryology, genetic engineering, euthanasia and abortion. Warnock's views may seem like a red rag to a bull to some, but her contribution to the debate is always stimulating. Enlivened by autobiographical anecdote and some delicious (...) side-swipes, Nature and Mortality is Mary Warnock at her most perceptive, wise and entertaining. (shrink)

What is the significance of empirical work on moral judgement for moral philosophy? Although the more radical conclusions that some writers have attempted to draw from this work are overstated, few areas of moral philosophy can remain unaffected by it. The most important question it raises is in moral epistemology. Given the explanation of our moral experience, how far can we trust it? Responding to this, the view defended here emphasizes the interrelatedness of moral psychology and moral epistemology. On this (...) view, the empirical study of moral judgement does have important implications for moral philosophy. But moral philosophy also has important implications for the empirical study of moral judgement. (shrink)

Western philosophical orthodoxy places many aspects of other people's lives outside the scope of our knowledge. Demonstrating an alternative to this view, however, this book argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's application of his unique psychoanalytic method to Gustave Flaubert is the culmination of his project to show that it is possible to know everything there is to know about another person. It examines how Sartre aims to revolutionize our way of thinking about others by presenting his existential psychoanalysis as the means (...) to knowledge of both ourselves and others. By so doing, it highlights how his determination to solve the longstanding philosophical conundrum about other minds drives him not only to incorporate insights from Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, Freud, Marx, and Beauvoir into his philosophy, but also to supplement and enhance his philosophy through the development and application of a new form of psychoanalysis. -/- Sartre's Existential Psychoanalysis integrates, for the first time, Sartre's psychoanalysis into his overarching philosophical project. By offering a critical interrogation of the role his psychoanalytical studies played in the development of his existentialism, Mary Edwards uncovers the overlooked philosophical significance of his existential psychoanalysis and brings it into a new and productive dialogue with current research in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy. (shrink)

This chapter first distinguishes between originality and creativity. True originality is rare, whether in art, science, or LEGO, because to be truly original means to have done something that no one has ever done before, and that no one could have anticipated. Most LEGO creations will not meet that condition, for with the exception of serious hobbyists who undertake massive builds, most players who make original creations are making creations that are commonplace. Painting or remolding or placing stickers on the (...) bricks counts against the spirit of LEGO creation. The chapter then discusses The LEGO Movie embodies the paradox that presents three conflicting models of creative LEGO play, illustrated by the Master Builders, Finn's father, and Emmet. The movie's creators were deliberately playing around with conflicting popular conceptions of creativity: creativity as madness, creativity as thinking outside the box, and creativity as vision. (shrink)

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases. We first show that notional plurality ratings predict verb agreement choices in pseudopartitives, in line with the “Marking” component of the Marking and Morphing theory of agreement processing. However, no account to date has derived notional plurality values from independently needed principles of language processing. We argue on the basis of new experimental evidence and a dynamical (...) systems model that the theoretical black box of notional plurality can be unpacked into objectively measurable semantic features. With these semantic features driving structure formation, our model reproduces the human verb production patterns as a byproduct of normal processing. Finally, we discuss how the self-organizing approach might be extended to other agreement attraction phenomena. (shrink)

This analysis tests the influence of personal, job, and family status characteristics on maternal employment. We use the Merged Child/mother File from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine employment patterns of mothers who gave birth between 1979 and 1986. Logistic regression is used to estimate the probabilities; proportional hazards techniques are used to estimate rates of leaving and return to employment after childbirth. We find that family status factors and the proportion of the family income the mother earns (...) are consistently important in predicting maternal employment. Human capital factors are more significant in predicting employment exits and the rate of exit than the rate of return or employment status one year after a birth. (shrink)

This book introduces the field of hermeneutics through a critique of military operations in Afghanistan. Following a brief survey of modern political history of the country, the authors examine the link between cultural factors and the inefficiency of nation-building operations. Additionally, the project discusses contending academic approaches to culture, and identifies shortcomings in their theoretical propositions for military operations in failed states. Ultimately, this volume contextualizes the evolution of hermeneutical thinking and the benefits it provides in assessing the transformation of (...) culture through military intervention. (shrink)

Among theories of human language comprehension, cue‐based memory retrieval has proven to be a useful framework for understanding when and how processing difficulty arises in the resolution of long‐distance dependencies. Most previous work in this area has assumed that very general retrieval cues like [+subject] or [+singular] do the work of identifying (and sometimes misidentifying) a retrieval target in order to establish a dependency between words. However, recent work suggests that general, handpicked retrieval cues like these may not be enough (...) to explain illusions of plausibility (Cunnings & Sturt, 2018), which can arise in sentences like The letter next to the porcelain plate shattered. Capturing such retrieval interference effects requires lexically specific features and retrieval cues, but handpicking the features is hard to do in a principled way and greatly increases modeler degrees of freedom. To remedy this, we use well‐established word embedding methods for creating distributed lexical feature representations that encode information relevant for retrieval using distributed retrieval cue vectors. We show that the similarity between the feature and cue vectors (a measure of plausibility) predicts total reading times in Cunnings and Sturt’s eye‐tracking data. The features can easily be plugged into existing parsing models (including cue‐based retrieval and self‐organized parsing), putting very different models on more equal footing and facilitating future quantitative comparisons. (shrink)