There is a growing recognition of Levinas's importance. It can in part be attributed to an increasing concern that twentieth-century continental philosophy seems to have no place for ethics. In making ethics fundamental to philosophy, rather than a problem to which we might one day return, Levinas transforms continental thought. The book brings together some of the most interesting and far-reaching responses to the work of Levinas, in three different areas: contemporary feminism, psychotherapy, and Levinas's relation to other philosophers. It (...) includes a newly translated paper by Levinas on suffering, and a specially commissioned interview. (shrink)

"Among the foremost Catholic philosophers of his generation. He has utilized the fullness of the Catholic intellectual tradition to brilliantly take the measure of modern philosophical thought... This volume is an expression of Robert Wood's singular philosophical outlook." -Jude Dougherty, dean emeritus, school of philosophy, The Catholic University of America.

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as (...) skills but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

Out of the ferment of recent debates about the intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood have developed an approach they call 'regulative epistemology'. This is partly a return to classical and medieval traditions, partly in the spirit of Locke's and Descartes's concern for intellectual formation, partly an exploration of connections between epistemology and ethics, and partly an approach that has never been tried before. Standing on the shoulders of recent epistemologists - including William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, Ernest Sosa, and Linda (...) Zagzebski - Roberts and Wood pursue epistemological questions by looking closely and deeply at particular traits of intellectual character such as love of knowledge, intellectual autonomy, intellectual generosity, and intellectual humility. Central to their vision is an account of intellectual goods that includes not just knowledge as properly grounded belief, but understanding and personal acquaintance, acquired and shared through the many social practices of actual intellectual life. This approach to intellectual virtue infuses the discipline of epistemology with new life, and makes it interesting to people outside the circle of professional epistemologists. It is epistemology for the whole intellectual community, as Roberts and Wood carefully sketch the ways in which virtues that would have been categorized earlier as moral make for agents who can better acquire, refine, and communicate important kinds of knowledge. (shrink)

From the ferment of recent debates about the intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood develop an approach they call 'regulative epistemology', exploring the connection between knowledge and intellectual virtue. In the course of their argument they analyse particular virtues of intellectual life - such as courage, generosity, and humility - in detail.

Some of the most interesting works in virtue ethics are the detailed, perceptive treatments of specific virtues and vices. This chapter aims to develop such work as it relates to intellectual virtues and vices. It begins by examining the virtue of intellectual humility. Its strategy is to situate humility in relation to its various opposing vices, which include vices like arrogance, vanity, conceit, egotism, grandiosity, pretentiousness, snobbishness, haughtiness, and self-complacency. From this list vanity and arrogance are focused on in particular. (...) Humble persons are not distinguished from arrogant persons by being unaware of or unconcerned with entitlements; rather, they lack the arrogance that entails a specific kind of motivation called ‘ego-exalting potency’. Humble people are motivated by pure interests regarding entitlements given their ability to serve as means to some valuable purpose or project. The chapter ends by considering a wide variety of ways intellectual humility can promote the acquisition of epistemic goods. (shrink)

Kant was one of the inventors of anthropology, and his lectures on anthropology were the most popular and among the most frequently given of his lecture courses. This volume contains the first translation of selections from student transcriptions of the lectures between 1772 and 1789, prior to the published version, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, which Kant edited himself at the end of his teaching career. The two most extensive texts, Anthropology Friedländer and Anthropology Mrongovius, are presented here (...) in their entirety, along with selections from all the other lecture transcriptions published in the Academy edition, together with sizeable portions of the Menschenkunde, first published in 1831. These lectures show that Kant had a coherent and well-developed empirical theory of human nature bearing on many other aspects of his philosophy, including cognition, moral psychology, politics and philosophy of history. (shrink)

In aesthetics and in philosophy generally, Dewey and Heidegger have many surprising convergences. Both find the contemporary world unsuitable for full human flourishing: Dewey because of the separation of art and religion from everyday life; Heidegger because of the disappearance of the sense of Mystery. Both go back to a time before the problems emerged. Both hold for the intentionality of consciousness, the bodily inhabitance of a common world having priority over a sovereign consciousness, the founding role of language in (...) the life-world, the distinction between the art-product and the working of art upon its audience, the founding role of poetry, and the way a sense of the Whole can open up in the working of art. But Dewey, centering upon the aesthetic as integral experience, underscored its linkage with the rhythmic character of the body interacting with the environment, while Heidegger focused upon the sense of the surrounding Mystery. (shrink)

What one takes to be a body is identified initially as what is available to sensing. Sensing and reflecting are not so available. How one conceives of theirrelation admits of at least six possibilities exhibited in the history of philosophy: Hobbesian materialism, Berkleyan idealism, Platonic dualism of soul and body,Aristotelian hylomorphism, Cartesian dualism of thought and extension, and a Leibnizian-Whiteheadian view of psycho-physical co-implication. The latter viewredraws the conceptual map in a way most in keeping with experience as a whole (...) and with neural physiology in particular. (shrink)

Contrary to wide-spread caricatures of Nietzsche, he has definite standards of value that are largely defensible, though on another basis than he provides. Thenadir is the Last Man; the zenith is the Overman. Contrary to the otherworldliness of Plato and the Christian tradition, Nietzsche demands fidelity to the earth anda love of the body. The modern virtue of truthfulness dissolved the tradition, but eventuated in the Last Man who lives in “wretched contentment.” The Overmanrequires organizing the chaos of one’s life (...) and submission to centuries-long practices without contempt for the earth. He demands the unity of conscious and unconscious, sensitivity to beauty, love of each individual thing and the love of eternity. He seeks broad vision grounding the unity of humankind in which each individual can find his or her highest potential. All these are eminently defensible values. (shrink)

Misunderstandings of Hegel have several roots: one is the intrinsic difficulty of his highly technical and interrelated conceptual sets, another is ideological opponents who consequently take statements out of context, and a third is following those of high stature who pass on the misunderstandings. Typical misunderstandings concern freedom and necessity, slavery, that status of the individual, God and the State, facts measuring up to concepts, the relation of rationality and actuality, the status of passion, and, above all, the nature of (...) absolute knowing. Resituating these notions within the whole of the System shows the one-sidedness of typical misunderstandings and opens the way toward appropriation. (shrink)

Hegel and Nietzsche stood opposed to the monastic tradition which they saw as based upon a denial of the intrinsic value of this life. Both sought to install eternity in this life and not seek for it in an afterlife. Central to both, and contrary to common caricatures of Hegel, is the notion of the heart, the aspect of total subjective participation, which is the locus of a fully concrete reason understood in Hegel’s sense. It is also central to Dostoevsky’s (...) Brothers Karamazov where the heart of Fr. Zosima, while yet rooted in the encompassing eternality of God, overcomes the contempt for the earth of Fr. Ferapont and leads Alyosha to embrace his vocation in the world. Hegel developed the fundamental categories that allows us to comprehend the situation. (shrink)

The article reflects on the need for an independent philosophy in relation to faith. After the assimilation of Plato and Aristotle, the official Church tended to attack attempts at independent philosophy as modes of unbelief. But it was precisely independent developments in modern thought that led to the transformation of the ordinary magisterium on certain key questions. Following von Balthasar, the article attempts to make Heidegger’s project our own: to think the ground of metaphysics, and thus of intellect and will, (...) in “the heart” by making use of the seed parables in the Gospels. Taking its point of departure from an analysis of the basic structural features of the field of experience, the text argues for a sympathetic study of the philosophical classics in order to establish a set of critical epicenters in oneself. This furnishes the basis for a dialogical pluralism that will aid in ecumenical dialogue and in the development of the ordinary magisterium. (shrink)

The free spirit is central to Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Each of them sees it as linked to the recognition of necessity. They also see freedom in relation to the Totality: God or nature for Spinoza, absolute spirit for Hegel, and for Nietzsche the will to power operating within the eternal recurrence of the same. For all three—especially for Nietzsche who might seem to hold the opposite—the free condition is won through strenuous self-discipline. Further, all three deal with the notion (...) of Being. For Spinoza, the notion of Being as the starting-point is equivalent to substance; for Hegel, Being is empty reference to Totality that affords primordial distance for individual human beings; for Nietzsche, Being is irrelevant emptiness. But it is only Hegel who establishes a ground for individual self-determinationthrough the emptiness of the human reference toward Totality. (shrink)

The notion of Being is central to Hegel as the beginning of the System and to Lonergan as what first arises in the mind. They both ask: how must the cosmos and human society be structured so that rational existence and flourishing are possible? Hegel claims to show the necessarily interlocking set of conditions. Logos-logic underpins the realms of Nature and Spirit that together limn the space of free individual existents. For Lonergan the notion of Being orients us toward the (...) Whole of the proportionate universe, and toward the Transcendent Cause. Inquiry moves from things present to us in sensation to ever broader explanatory modes of things in relation to one another. Through insight, ways of construing the Whole are formed and reformed. Things, scientific systems, and social systems are not static but are on the move in the universe that has the form of emergent probability. (shrink)