This paper argues that the possibility of global justice is premised on the solutions of three-fold interrelated problem: (1) problem of heterogeneity, (2) problem of inequality, (3) problem of realpolitik. The problem of heterogeneity questions the assumed globality equated as universality or commonality underpinning global justice in view of the empirical human diversity and plurality that cannot be assumed away by the desirability of the normativity of global justice. The problem of inequality highlights the ineradicability of global inequality as a (...) pervasive fact of international life. It also criticizes the fairness argument that tries to make do with the ineradicable inequalities as long as they work towards the least advantaged members of global society mainly by rendering such an attempt as futile considering the inapplicability of principles of justice, Rawls's difference principle for example, in the global context; the unwillingness of powerful states to relinquish their hierarchical positions in the global political structure that benefit them; and the difficulty of not knowing what in/equality would mean for the least well-off when the fairness argument is granted. The problem of realpolitik makes the subordination of realpolitik (power and interest) to idealpolitik (justice)unwarranted given that the global realities point to the converse of subordination, especially the realities of the hierarchical structure of global politics and its concomitant unequal power relations. (shrink)

An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined associations of God beliefs, religious engagement, conventional religious beliefs and paranormal beliefs with performance measures of cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style. An analytic cognitive style negatively predicted both religious and paranormal beliefs (...) when controlling for cognitive ability as well as religious engagement, sex, age, political ideology, and education. Participants more willing to engage in analytic reasoning were less likely to endorse supernatural beliefs. Further, an association between analytic cognitive style and religious engagement was mediated by religious beliefs, suggesting that an analytic cognitive style negatively affects religious engagement via lower acceptance of conventional religious beliefs. Results for types of God belief indicate that the association between an analytic cognitive style and God beliefs is more nuanced than mere acceptance and rejection, but also includes adopting less conventional God beliefs, such as Pantheism or Deism. Our data are consistent with the idea that two people who share the same cognitive ability, education, political ideology, sex, age and level of religious engagement can acquire very different sets of beliefs about the world if they differ in their propensity to think analytically. (shrink)

While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative basis and, as an extension of this, predict that individual differences in analytic thinking will be influential in determining beliefs and values. Along with assessments of cognitive ability (...) and style, religious beliefs, and moral values, participants judged the wrongness of acts considered disgusting and conventionally immoral, but that do not violate care- or fairness-based moral principles. Differences in willingness to engage analytic thinking predicted reduced judgements of wrongness, independent of demographics, political ideology, religiosity, and moral values. Further, we show that those who were higher in cognitive ability were less likely to indicate that purity, patriotism, and respect for traditions and authority are important to their moral thinking. These findings are consistent with a “Reflectionist” view that assumes a role for analytic thought in determining substantive, deeply-held human beliefs and values. (shrink)

This book argues that Whitehead’s introduction of God into his process metaphysics renders it incoherent. Replacing roles assigned to God with the powers inherent in finite entities, George Allan recovers a coherent presentation of the truth of time’s primacy, using Whitehead’s major writings.

Female genital alteration is any cutting, removal or destruction of any part of the external female genitalia. Various FGA practices are common throughout the world. While most frequent in Africa and Asia, transglobal migration has brought ritual FGA to Western nations. All forms of FGA are generally considered undesirable for medical and ethical reasons when performed on minors. One ritual FGA procedure is the vulvar nick. This is a small laceration to the vulva that does not cause morphological changes. Besides (...) being performed as a primary ritual procedure it has been proposed as a substitute for more extensive forms of FGA. Measures advocated or taken to reduce the burden of FGA can be punitive or non-punitive. Even if it is unethical to perform VN, we argue that it also is unethical to attempt to suppress it through punishment. First, punishment of VN is likely to cause more harm than good overall, even to those ostensibly being protected. Second, punishment is likely to exceed legitimate retributive ends. We do not argue in favor of performing VN. Rather, we argue that non-punitive strategies such as education and harm reduction should be employed. (shrink)

A Distinction of four species of tragedy and epic poetry is laid down, though not explained at length, in two passages of the Poetics, and, as I hope to show, mentioned in another. At the end of the treatise, Aristotle positively says that he has given an explanation of both the species and the component parts of tragedy and epic poetry.

In her study Anarchism and Education, Judith Suissa argues that anarchist learning entails a constant interplay of tensions arising from emergent desires to transform society and the challenges society poises for realizing them. This is inescapable because a critical attitude is integral to an anarchist process of learning, infusing it with creative license premised on the conviction that we need not accept things as they are, that learning is not only a space for understanding, but also enactment. My purpose is (...) to explore this dynamic in the work of graphic artist Kevin Pyle, an American-born artist with a substantive body of illustrated books and comics addressing a myriad of issues. I am interested... (shrink)

The justification for restrictive state intervention (RSI) such as criminal punishment or state reversal of parental decisions is called a limiting, or intervention (Buchanan and Brock 1989, 10), p...

In this concluding chapter, Allan and Keller posit that Just Peace should be defined as a process resting on four necessary and sufficient conditions: thin recognition whereby the other is accepted as autonomous; thick recognition whereby identities need to be accounted for; renouncement, requiring significant sacrifices from all parties; and rule, the objectification of a Just Peace by a ‘text’ requiring a common language respecting the identities of each, and defining their rights and duties. This approach, based on a (...) language-oriented process amongst directly concerned parties, goes beyond liberal and culturalist perspectives. By moving beyond the idea of a peace founded on norms claiming universal scope, each side of a conflict has a place at the negotiating table to present their own perspective on what justice might entail. This inclusion into the decision-making process helps create the feeling of personal investment in the final negotiated product. In addition, negotiators need to work towards building a novel shared reality as well as a new common language to help foster an enduring harmony between previously clashing peoples. (shrink)

Janik beschrijft in zijn filosofische essay aan de hand van een aantal filosofische posities zijn visie op het thema afgoderij en de rol die religie speelt in een seculiere wereld.

'Omdat oudere vrouwen meer ervaring hebben, zijn ze verstandiger en beoefenen ze meer discretie bij het opzetten van een intrige om verdenking te voorkomen. De omgang met hen is derhalve veiliger voor je reputatie.'.

De stilte in Mahlers symfonieën en de stilte die Wittgenstein bepleit zijn eenzelfde stilte; ze zijn beide een reactie op Nietzsches notie van de dood van God en de crisis van de wetenschap. Deze stilte is een moment van puur luisteren. Het is een moment van catharsis en een uiting van persoonlijke of stilzwijgende gedachten die niet objectief, dat wil zeggen in wetenschappelijke proposities, kan worden gerepliceerd. Catharsis drukt geen kennis uit, maar een direct, ongemedieerd weten dat we zijn.

Plato was de eerste filosoof die de verlichting der mensheid op rationele basis trachtte te stoelen. Diderot werkte Plato's ideeën uit in zijn filosofische dialoog De neef van Rameau, waarin hij op ironische wijze de tegenstrijdigheden in de denkwereld van zijn tijd in de richting van de verlichting tracht om te buigen.

It was Paul Engelmann who stimulated Wittgenstein to consider art as the avenue of access to what is higher, the "mystical" in the Tractatus. Unlike the course of their personal friendship, it is not easy to reconstruct the nature of their philosophical confrontation with one another. In the light of their correspondence, Wittgenstein's notebooks and the bit we know from biographers, Wittgenstein's development in the period immediately before he met Engelmann is sketched, discussing the influence of Hertz and Weininger, and (...) determining what his meeting with Engelmann meant for his philosophy. (shrink)

Janik beschouwt het falen als problematiek in een op succes gerichte wereld, waarin mislukking iets is geworden waarvoor men zich moet verontschuldigen. Hij gaat in op de soorten van falen die er zijn en de verschillende betekenissen die de term kan hebben, om inzicht te scheppen in de complexiteit van het begrip.

Stephen Edelston Toulmin, philosopher and historian of science, pioneer in the logical analysis of substantive argumentation, was educated in physics and philosophy at Cambridge, where he studied with Paul Dirac, John Wisdom and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Cambridge, Issac Newton’s university, remained his philosophical home: he always was very critical of the way that philosophy was done at The Other Place, as Oxford is known there. The only philosopher whom he really revered there was John Austin – although it is necessary hastily (...) to add that he deeply respected Gilbert Ryle and Isaiah Berlin. Like the latter, he considered himself a “public intellectual”. As such he was delighted to be invited to become a contributor to Encounter and later, from the mid-1960s a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He was fascinated by Wittgenstein, attending as many of his classes as he could, but had no interest in becoming close to him. Both the idea of discipleship and Wittgenstein’s dominating personally were uncongenial to him. Like Wittgenstein and Berlin he was never at home among professional philosophers . On occasion his relationships with philosophers could be stormy indeed as was the case with Sir Karl Popper and Nelson Goodman. He prided himself on being an amateur and was only mildly disturbed when “experts” chided him as a bungler. His deepest belief was that professional philosophers do not determine what the real problems of philosophy are; rather those problems arise out of conundrums in human life. That meant for him engaging in intense dialogues, with physicists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, medical doctors, lawyers, musician artists and, of course, historians of science. (shrink)

My problem is how should we approach the concrete moral problems that arise in medicine, law, management or engineering in a pluralistic society — in what follows I shall concentrate upon medicine, but my concern is basically with the whole spectrum presented by the term “professional ethics”. My thesis is that we shall not be in a position to discuss the moral problems of professionals until we get clear about “where ethics comes from” as one concerned scholar put it1 — (...) something that modern philosophy is generally confused about — and something that the very notion of ‘applied’ ethics confuses. My suggestion is that we have much to learn from the example of the Hastings Center , with respect to handling problems of professional ethics. My assumptions are, first, that philosophers — as Alasdair Maclntyre has long insisted — for the most part confuse the ethical issues they would illuminate by endeavoring to supply theoretical solutions to practical problems, and, second, that this confusion is rooted in an erroneous notion of how concepts function, namely, in the idea that concepts have meaning prior to their application. (shrink)

It was Paul Engelmann who stimulated Wittgenstein to consider art as the avenue of access to what is higher, the "mystical" in the Tractatus. Unlike the course of their personal friendship, it is not easy to reconstruct the nature of their philosophical confrontation with one another. In the light of their correspondence, Wittgenstein's notebooks and the bit we know from biographers, Wittgenstein's development in the period immediately before he met Engelmann is sketched, discussing the influence of Hertz and Weininger, and (...) determining what his meeting with Engelmann meant for his philosophy. (shrink)

Schönberg liet zijn pogingen om Igisch te componeren vergezeld gaan met kritische en analytische geschriften. Hij wilde, net als vele andere kritische intellectuelen van zijn tijd, een authentieke Weense muziekcultuur ontwikkelen, die zich tegen de heersende esthetische smaak keerde. Zijn hekel aan populaire muziek was eerder gegrond op morele dan op esthetische overwegingen. Mooie muziek leidt tot dagdromen en niet tot nadenken, vond hij. Zijn werk eist een aktieve deelname van de luisteraar, die de idee achter de muziek moet trachten (...) te vinden. (shrink)

‘Tijdens een van hun eerste ontmoetingen in 1911 wist Wittgenstein Bertrand Russell verstomd te doen staan door te weigeren toe te geven dat er geen neushoorn in de kamer was, en zulks ondanks het feit dat Russell er geen kon vinden toen hij ernaar had gezocht.’.

"Wittgenstein in Vienna" documents Wittgenstein's life in the city: the places he, his family and those with whom he was in contact, lived, worked, entertained and socialized. The book will be a source of enrichment to the cultural tourist in Vienna. Its authors are authorities on Wittgenstein's philosophy especially in relation to Viennese culture and popular culture, in particular the world of the coffee house and cabaret.

The Sovereignty of Law presents Trevor Allan's most recent and fully elaborated defence of common law constitutionalism - an account of the unwritten or non-codified constitution as a complex articulation of legal and moral principles, defining what in the British context are the requirements of the rule of law. The British constitution is conceived as a coherent set of fundamental principles of the rule of law, legislative supremacy, and separation of powers. These principles.

This chapter distinguishes Just Peace from its closest ‘moral’ neighbours — a stable peace and positive peace. Drawing on both consequentialist and deontological considerations, Allan develops an international ethical scale to evaluate different acts from a moral standpoint, with different levels of conflict as the baseline of ethical behavior. The more extreme the discord, the worse it is considered on the scale; the more harmonious, the better. Arguing that absolute unhappiness and absolute happiness are not of this world, (...) class='Hi'>Allan presents eight intermediary moral situations, each being superseded by the next one in ethical terms: genocide, war, non-war, Just War, stable peace, Just Peace, positive peace, and Global Care. He develops an ethic of ‘global care’ based on feminist theories of care, religious and secular declarations on a global ethic, evolutionary theory arguments, and a critique of a liberal human rights approach. (shrink)