The modern era was dominated by conflicts between claims to certainty about justice and denials that certainty is warranted. The purpose of this book is to develop a postmodern alternative to both philosophies, one which is universal without being absolutist. The approach is _dialectical_ in Plato's sense of that term. Dialectic is both necessary and sufficient for the theoretical and the practical aspects of living. The primary symbol in this book is the Athenian Socrates who spent his days in the (...) Agora and his evenings in the houses of his friends, the active professionals of the world's first democracy. His questions were unabashedly philosophical, concerned with the most urgent matters. What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? Who is best suited to rule in the state? How should young people be educated? The nature of justice is closely connected with other questions of value, so the discussion freely moves from that central focus to related matters with the primary goal of developing a dialectical philosophy that is both applicable to life and open to all. _Universal Justice_ is concerned with _how_ to think about justice rather than _what_ to think about justice. (shrink)

This article explores emotions and their relationship to ‘somatic responses’, i.e., one’s automatic responses to sensations of pain, cold, warmth, sudden intensity. To this end, it undertakes a Husserlian phenomenological analysis of the first-hand experience of eight basic emotions, briefly exploring their essential aspects: their holistic nature, their identifying dynamic transformation of the lived body, their two-layered intentionality, their involuntary initiation and voluntary espousal. The fact that the involuntary tensional shifts initiating emotions are irreplicatable voluntarily, is taken to show that (...) all emotions have an innate core, a conclusion corroborated by their strong similarities to somatic responses in dynamics, hedonic tone, and topology. The fact that emotions may be culturally reworked, is shown to be explicable in terms of their complex nature: their dependence on belief, their voluntary espousal, and their ready social transmittability. Finally, it is argued that emotions may plausibly be deemed the evolutionary descendants of somatic responses. (shrink)

As Descartes noted, a proper account of the nature of the being one is begins with a basic self present in first-person experience, a self that one cannot cogently doubt being. This paper seeks to uncover such a self, first within consciousness and thinking, then within the lived or first-person felt body. After noting the lack of grounding of Merleau-Ponty’s commonly referenced reflections, it undertakes a phenomenological investigation of the body that finds the basic self to reside in one’s espoused (...) feelings and striving, both bodily in nature. It then examines the relationship of the lived body to the visual body and to the body studied by science. Two issues concerning that relationship are taken up. It is concluded that on the available evidence neither the apparent agency nor the apparent free will of the lived body is illusory. (shrink)