In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia’s love affair with social perfection and reveals how ...

The term “ideology” can cover almost any set of ideas, but its power to bewitch political activists results from its strange logic. It is part philosophy, part science, and part spiritual revelation, all tied together in leading to a remarkable paradox—that the modern Western world, beneath its liberal appearance, is actually the most systematically oppressive system of despotism the world has ever seen. In Alien Powers, Kenneth Minogue takes this complex intellectual construction apart, analyzing its logical, rhetorical, and (...) psychological devices, and thus opening it up to critical analysis. This new, ISI Books’ Background edition of Alien Powers includes a new introduction to the text by Martyn P. Thompson and critical essays on the text by political theorist Paul Gottfried and philosopher Stephen A. Erickson. (shrink)

Because psychotherapists are not moral teachers, they ought not to advise their clients about evaluative questions. This means that their advice must be limited to a concern with the client''s view of reality. It happens that in our times, there are prefabricated views of reality on offer from a variety of ideologies-Marxism and feminism being currently the most influential. Ideologists not only offer prefabricated realities-called consciousness- but also present a set of arguments to show that because choice is unreal, consciousness (...) is all that matters. Adopting the ideological concept of consciousness thus becomes a backdoor variant of the ultimate sin against scientific method: namely smuggling unsubstantiated, indeed undiscussed, values into therapy. (shrink)

FOUCAULT: A CRITICAL READER Edited by David Couzens Hoy New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. 246pp., $45.00 ($14.95 paper) MICHEL FOUCAULT by Mark Cousins and Althar Hussain New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984. 278pp., $27.95 ($11.95 paper).

My aim in this essay is to distinguish and comment on a specific movement of thought which I shall call “democracy as a telos.” This expression refers to a conception of democracy, cultivated by normative political philosophers, in which all democratic potentialities have at last been realized. The result is thought to be a perfected political community. Democracy as a telos must thus be distinguished from the actual liberal democracies we enjoy at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, democracy (...) as a telos takes off from a specific rejection of such familiar institutions as elections, political parties, oppositions, a free press, and the rest, which are regarded, according to taste, as individualistic, bourgeois, atomistic, formal, and abstract. Democracy as a telos refers to the theories of reformers who, dissatisfied with our present condition, argue that only a radically transformed democracy can generate a real political community. (shrink)

It is one of Karl Popper's great distinctions that he has an intense—some would say too intense—awareness of the history of philosophy within which he works. He knows not only its patterns, but also its comedies, and sometimes he plays rhetorically against their grain. He knows, for example, that the drive to consistency tends to turn philosophy into compositions of related doctrines, each seeming to involve the others. Religious belief, for example, tends to go with idealism and free will, religious (...) scepticism with materialism and determinism. Popper does not believe in a religion, was for long some kind of a socialist, and takes his bearings from the philosophy of science. Aha! it seems we have located him. Here is a positivist, a materialist, probably a determinist. But of course he denies he is any of these things. Again, like many modern thinkers, he wants to extend scientific method not only to the social sciences but also to history. So far so familiar, until we discover that he regards nature as no less ‘cloudy’ than human societies. (shrink)

My intention is to explore the Hobbesian account of civil association in terms of his conception of the state of nature, especially as it relates to his view of language in politics. I start from the view that the achievement of a political philosopher must be to reveal some central presupposition of our thought and action, as the Greeks did in their exploration of justice, Rousseau with the general will, and Locke with the idea of property. Hobbes takes the view (...) that we cannot properly understand ideas such as sovereignty, government, law, obligation and so on without presupposing the kind of unstable conflict-ridden situation he called the condition of nature. (shrink)

This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal education from their own intellectual and religious experience, which was informed by a specifically Christian conception of the place of education in a fully developed (...) human life. I suggest that the strength of their understanding of liberal education derives from its connection to the various small cohesive religious communities to which they were connected. Nonetheless, this insularity was also the primary weakness because each writer ended universalising what was in fact a particular and unique cultural and religious experience instead of providing convincing proof of a single human nature with a single telos. I will contrast this teleological conception of liberal education with that of Michael Oakeshott and his student Kenneth Minogue, both of whom wrote about education in a post-religious era in which the earlier consensus had completely broken down. They both celebrated the variety of practices which human beings have invented for themselves over the past several centuries (and past several millennia), and did not appear to suffer from the lack of any unifying single human telos. I will suggest that their understanding of practice insulated them from the need for a single unifying telos. (shrink)

This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal education from their own intellectual and religious experience, which was informed by a specifically Christian conception of the place of education in a fully developed (...) human life. I suggest that the strength of their understanding of liberal education derives from its connection to the various small cohesive religious communities to which they were connected. Nonetheless, this insularity was also the primary weakness because each writer ended universalising what was in fact a particular and unique cultural and religious experience instead of providing convincing proof of a single human nature with a single telos. I will contrast this teleological conception of liberal education with that of Michael Oakeshott and his student Kenneth Minogue, both of whom wrote about education in a post-religious era in which the earlier consensus had completely broken down. They both celebrated the variety of practices which human beings have invented for themselves over the past several centuries (and past several millennia), and did not appear to suffer from the lack of any unifying single human telos. I will suggest that their understanding of practice insulated them from the need for a single unifying telos. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner is one of the leading thinkers in the social sciences and humanities today. Since the publication of his first important articles some two decades ago, debate has continued to develop over his distinctive contributions to contemporary political philosophy, the history of political theory, the philosophy of social science, and the discussion of interpretation and hermeneutics across the humanities and social sciences. Nevertheless, his most valuable essays and the best critical articles concerning his work have been scattered in various (...) journals and difficult to obtain. Meaning and Context includes five of the most widely discussed articles by Skinner, which present his approach to the study of political thought and the interpretation of texts. Following these are seven articles by his critics, five of these drawn from earlier publications and two, by John Keane and Charles Taylor, written especially for this volume. Finally, there appears a fifty-seven page reply by Skinner--a major new statement in which he defends and reformulates his method and lays out new lines of research. The editorial introduction provides a systematic overview of the evolution of Skinner's work and of the main reactions to it.Besides James Tully, John Keane, and Charles Taylor, the contributors include Joseph V. Femia, Keith Graham, Martin Hollis, Kenneth Minogue, and Nathan Tarcov. (shrink)

Contents: John A. HALL and Ian JARVIE: Preface. John A. HALL and Ian JARVIE: The Life and Times of Ernest Gellner. PART 1 INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND. Ji_i MUSIL: The Prague Roots of Ernest Gellner's Thinking. Chris HANN: Gellner on Malinowski: Words and Things in Central Europe. Tamara DRAGADZE: Ernest Gellner in the Soviet East. PART 2 NATIONS AND NATIONALISM. Brendan O'LEARY: On the Nature of Nationalism: An Appraisal of Ernest Gellner's Writings on Nationalism. Kenneth MINOGUE: Ernest Gellner and the (...) Dangers of Theorising Nationalism. Anthony D. SMITH: History and Modernity: Reflection on the Theory of Nationalism. Michael MANN: The Emergence of Modern European Nationalism. Nicholas STARGARDT: Gellner's Nationalism: The Spirit of Modernisation? PART 3 PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENT. Peter BURKE: Reflections on the History of Encyclopaedias. Alan MACFARLANE: Ernest Gellner and the Escape to Modernity. Ronald DORE: Sovereign Individuals. Shmuel EISENSTADT: Japan: Non-Axial Modernity. Marc FERRO: l'Indépendance Telescopée: De la Décolonisation a l'Impérialisme Multinational. PART 4 ISLAM. Abdellah HAMMOUDI: Segmentarity, Social Stratification, Political Power and Sainthood: Reflections on Gellner's Theses. Henry MUNSON, Jr.: Rethinking Gellner's Segmentary Analysis of Morocco's Ait cAtta. Jean BAECHLER: Sur le charisme. Charles LINDHOLM: Despotism and Democracy: State and Society in the Premodern Middle East. Henry MUNSON, Jr.: Muslim and Jew in Morocco: Reflections on the Distinction between Belief and Behavior. Talal ASAD: The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. PART 5 SCIENCE AND DISENCHANTMENT. Perry ANDERSON: Science, Politics, Enchantment. Ralph SCHROEDER: From the Big Divide to the Rubber Cage: Gellner's Conception of Science and Technology. John DAVIS: Irrationality in Social Life. PART 6 RELATIVISM AND UNIVERSALS. John SKORUPSKI: The Post-Modern Hume: Ernest Gellner's 'Enlightenment Fundamentalism'. John WETTERSTEN: Ernest Gellner: A Wittgensteinian Rationalist. Ian JARVIE: Gellner's Positivism. Raymond BOUDON: Relativising Relativism: When Sociology Refutes the Sociology of Science. Rod AYA: The Devil in Social Anthropology; or, the Empiricist Exorcist; or, the Case Against Cultural Relativism. PART 7 PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. William MCNEILL: A Swan Song for British Liberalism? Andrus PARK: Gellner and the Long Trends of History. Eero LOONE: Marx, Gellner, Power. Rosaire LANGLOIS: Coercion, Cognition and Production: Gellner's Challenge to Historical Materialism and Postmodernism. Ernest GELLNER: Reply to Critics. Ian JARVIE: Complete Bibliography of Gellner's Work. Name index. Subject index. (shrink)

This volume brings together a diverse range of perspectives reflecting the international appeal and multi-disciplinary interest that Oakeshott now attracts. The essays offer a variety of approaches to Oakeshott’s thought — testament to the abiding depth, originality, suggestiveness and complexity of his writings. The essays include contributions from well-known Oakeshott scholars along with ample representation from a new generation. As a collection these essays challenge Oakeshott’s reputation as merely a ‘critic of social planning’.Contributors include Josiah Lee Auspitz, Debra Candreva, Wendell (...) John Coats Jr., Douglas DenUyl, George Feaver, Paul Franco, Richard Friedman, Timothy Fuller, Robert Grant, Eric S. Kos, Leslie Marsh, Kenneth Minogue, Terry Nardin, Keith Sutherland, Martyn Thompson and Gerhard Wolmarans. (shrink)

The lead-off essay by Kenneth Minogue is an Oakeshottian reflection on the extent to which modern people have become passive spectators of action, detached from traditional loyalties and modes of identity and thus a kind of new Epicurean, shorn of the genuinely contemplative character of the originals. Eric Ormsby follows this with a judicious appraisal of the possibilities and perils for culture associated with the advent of the new information technology. Anthony Daniels provides a similarly sober account of (...) the many consequences and dilemmas of medical technology for the noble Hippocratic art. David Pryce-Jones’s essay recounts the antipolitical utopianism of the totalitarian ideologies that shadowed most of the twentieth century and worries about the potentially destructive utopian tendencies in the contemporary project of European integration. Keith Windschuttle surveys the range of ideologies currently deployed in the academy, most of which derive from vulgarizations of Nietzsche. Edward Said’s influential body of work comes in for particular scrutiny here. Mark Steyn contributes a discussion of the now all-too-familiar self-hatred of Western intellectuals with the blunt precision and wit so characteristic of his splendid newspaper columns. Martin Greenberg’s essay on Burke manages to educe in brief compass the understanding of freedom that is the animating heart of that exemplary statesman’s thought and practice. Diana Schaub makes a case for the importance of political philosophy to the practice of modern politics centered on the statesmanship of Lincoln. Robert Bork’s chapter on the “adversary judiciary” limns the extent to which judges have gone from being the guarantors of the rule of law to the most effective antagonists of traditional institutions and values. Finally, Roger Kimball fittingly recalls the original Ciceronian understanding of culture as the development of the mind analogous to the cultivation of the earth, and connects it with the celebrated program of criticism proposed by Matthew Arnold. (shrink)

David Hume wrote that Berkeley's arguments `admit of no answer but produce no conviction'. This book aims at the kind of understanding of Berkeley's philosophy that comes from seeing how we ourselves might be brought to embrace it. Berkeley held that matter does not exist, and that the sensations we take to be caused by an indifferent and independent world are instead caused directly by God. Nature becomes a text, with no existence apart from the spirits who transmit and receive (...) it. Kenneth P. Winkler presents these conclusions as natural consequences of Berkeley's reflections on such topics as representation, abstraction, necessary truth, and cause and effect. In the closing chapters Proefssor Winkler offers new interpretations of Berkeley's view on unperceived objects, corpuscularian science, and our knowledge of God and other minds. (shrink)

A well-regarded scientist who offered expert testimony at the high-profile 2005 trial over the teaching of evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, presents an ...

Anne Conway’s Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, first published in 1690, is probably the most ambitious contribution to early modern metaphysics by a woman writing in the English language. This beautifully prepared edition makes Conway’s treatise available to twentieth-century readers in an accessible English translation of the 1690 Latin text—itself a translation of an original English manuscript that has long been lost.

Referentialism has underappreciated consequences for our understanding of the ways in which mind, language, and world relate to one another. In exploring these consequences, this book defends a version of referentialism about names, demonstratives, and indexicals, in a manner appropriate for scholars and students in philosophy or the cognitive sciences. To demonstrate his view, Kenneth A. Taylor offers original and provocative accounts of a wide variety of semantic, pragmatic, and psychological phenomena, such as empty names, propositional attitude contexts, the (...) nature of concepts, and the ultimate source and nature of normativity. (shrink)

Whether to treat autism as exculpatory in any given circumstance appears to be influenced both by models of autism and by theories of moral responsibility. This article looks at one particular combination of theories: autism as theory of mind challenges and moral responsibility as requiring appropriate experience of the reactive attitudes. In pursuing this particular combination of ideas, we do not intend to endorse them. Our goal is, instead, to explore the implications of this combination of especially prominent ideas about (...) autism and about moral responsibility. These implications can be quite serious and practical for autists and those who interact directly with autists, as well as for broader communities as they attend to the fair, compassionate, and respectful treatment of increasing numbers of autistic adults. We find that these theories point to a limited range of situations in which autists should not be blamed for transgressive actions for which neurotypical individuals should be blamed. We build on what others have written on these issues by bringing in a recent cognitive model of the role theory of mind plays in empathy, by discussing the social implications of the theoretical findings, and by raising questions about the compatibility of reactive attitude theories of moral responsibility with the neurodiversity approach to autism. (shrink)

Includes generous selections from the Essay, topically arranged passages from the replies to Stillingfleet, a chronology, a bibliography, a glossary, and an index based on the entries that Locke himself devised.

Dan Zahavi has argued persuasively that some versions of self- representationalism are implausible on phenomenological and dialectical grounds: they fail to make sense of primitive self-knowledge and lead to an infinite regress. Zahavi proposes an alternative view of ubiquitous prereflective self-consciousness.

This is a pre- publication copy of an article that appeared in "Debating Design from Darwin to DNA," edited by Michael Ruse and William Dembski. Debating Design..

It is widely held that there are no indigenous roots in China for the rule of law; it is an import from the West. The Chinese legal tradition, rather, is rule by law, as elaborated in ancient Legalist texts such as the Han Feizi. According to the conventional reading of these texts, law is amoral and an instrument in the hands of a central ruler who uses law to consolidate and maintain power. The ruler is the source of all law (...) and stands above the law, so that law, in the final analysis, is whatever pleases the ruler. This essay argues, to the contrary, that the instrumentalism of the Han Feizi is more sophisticated and more principled than the conventional reading acknowledges. It suggests that, by examining the text of the Han Feizi through the lens provided by American legal theorist Lon Fuller, we can detect an explicit articulation of what Fuller called the internal morality of law. The principles of this morality are elaborated and their importance explained. In this way, the Han Feizi is retrieved as a significant reference point for thinking about legal reform in China today. (shrink)

As a neurodevelopmental condition that affects cognitive functioning, autism has been used as a test case for theories of moral responsibility. Most of the relevant literature focuses on autism’s impact on theory of mind and empathy. Here I examine aspects of autism related to executive function. I apply an account of how we might fail to be reasons responsive to argue that autism can increase the frequency of excuses for transgressive behavior, but will rarely make anyone completely exempt from moral (...) responsibility in general. On this account, although excuses may apply more often to autists than to others, the excuses that apply to autists are just the same excuses that can apply to anyone. (shrink)

Kenneth Winkler's esteemed edition of Berkeley's _Principles_ is based on the second edition, the last one published in Berkeley's lifetime. Life other members of Hackett's philosophical classics series, it features editorial elements found to be of particular value to students and their teachers: analytical table of contents; chronology of the author's life; selected bibliography; note on the text; glossary; and index.

I consider Ralph Waldo Emerson’s creative appropriation of a philosophical doctrine that helps to make sense of an attitude towards life, its gifts and its burdens, that is often expressed in Puritan diaries. The doctrine, now known as the doctrine of continuous creation, holds that in conserving the world, God re-creates it at every moment, making the same creative effort at each ever-advancing now that God made at the very beginning. Continuous creation was explicitly endorsed by at least one Puritan (...) diarist, Jonathan Edwards, and it helps to explain the intense self-inspection and valiant response to life to which other Puritan diarists (including Emerson's aunt, Mary Moody Emerson) testify. Continuous creation was an important ingredient in the idealism of Edwards and, once translated, it became an important ingredient in the idealism of Emerson. My primary aim to describe Emerson’s creative translation of the doctrine as Edwards understood it, but I also discuss Emerson's relation to the Puritan diary, considered as a literary form. I close by suggesting that for us, a version of the doctrine of continuous creation can perhaps be a source of optimism and an incentive to action, as I believe it was for Emerson. I also comment briefly on Emerson's grateful reliance on text-to-text translations. When Emerson studied translations of sacred texts from around the world, what he heard was not difference and dissent, but agreement: agreement on the very points that united him with Edwards, different as they were in other ways. (shrink)

This paper explores the logical consequences of the the thesis that all of the essential properties of consciousness can be known introspectively (Completeness, called "Strong Transparency" in the paper, following D.M. Armstrong's older terminology). It is argued that it can be known introspectively that consciousness does not have complete access to its essential properties; and it is show how this undermines conceivability arguments for dualism.

Some philosophers think that intentionality is ontologically distinct from phenomenal consciousness; call this the Thesis of Separation. Terence Horgan and John Tienson (2002, p. 520) call this.

Focusing on the ground-breaking and often controversial science of Charles Darwin, the author seeks to bridge the gulf between science and religion on the subject of human evolution.

_Mirroring and Attunement_ offers a new approach to psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion. Viewing these activities from a broadly relational perspective, Wright proposes that each provides a medium for creative dialogue: the artist discovers himself within his self-created forms, the religious person through an internal dialogue with ‘God’, and the analysand through the inter-subjective medium of the analysis. Building on the work of Winnicott, Stern and Langer, the author argues that each activity is rooted in the infant’s preverbal relationship with (...) the mother who ‘holds’ the emerging self in an ambience of mirroring forms, thereby providing a ‘place’ for the self to ‘be’. He suggests that the need for subjective reflection persists throughout the life cycle and that psychoanalysis, artistic creation and religion can be seen as cultural attempts to provide the self with resonant containment. They thus provide renewed opportunities for holding and emotional growth. _Mirroring and Attunement_ will provide essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and art therapists and be of interest to anyone working at the interface between psychoanalysis, art and religion. _ _. (shrink)

The dominant conception of educational equality in the United States is meritocratic: an individual's chances of educational achievements should track only talent and effort, not social class or other morally irrelevant factors. The meritocratic conception must presuppose that natural talent and effort can be isolated from social class — and environmental factors in general — if it is to provide guidance in the world of educational policy and practice. In this article Kenneth R. Howe challenges that presupposition and related (...) elements of the meritocratic conception having to do with the role of competition and education as a positional good. Howe argues that, in use, the meritocratic conception unavoidably distributes education based on developed talent and motivation that cannot be isolated from the effects of social class, thus masking the real basis of the distribution and contributing to the perpetuation of illicit group privilege. Howe then entertains and rejects several rejoinders to his critique, including that the meritocratic conception might eliminate the presupposition of isolatable natural talent. Finally, Howe sketches an alternative conception of educational equality based on Elizabeth Anderson's adaptation of Rawls's “democratic equality.”. (shrink)