Ian McHarg opened a new way for us to see the world. His approach for interpreting the play between natural and cultural systems has become the dominant visualization technology of our time, just a...

Ian McHarg opened a new way for us to see the world. His approach for interpreting the play between natural and cultural systems has become the dominant visualization technology of our time, just a...

Judith Jarvis Thomson and others contend that rights are pro-tanto rather than absolute, that is, that rights may permissibly be infringed in some circumstances. Alan Gewirth maintains that there are some rights that are absolute because infringing them would amount to unspeakable evil. However, there seem to be possible circumstances in which it would be permissible to infringe even those rights. Specificationists, such as Gerald Gaus, Russ Shafer-Landau, Hillel Steiner and Kit Wellman, argue that all rights are absolute because (...) they have implicit exceptions, the exceptions being either right-voiding or right-compatible. Specificationists have charged pro-tantoism with preventing rights from being action-guiding, and pro-tantoists have levelled the same charge against specificationism. I show that both charges are mistaken. Pro-tantoists claim that specificationists cannot account for the moral remainder that we recognise in some circumstances and which can be explained by reference to a permissible right-infringement. Specificationists retort that the moral remainder can be explained by invoking compensation-rights. I show that the pro-tantoist claim is true and that the specificationist retort is false on two counts: explanation in terms of compensation-rights is not applicable to all cases; and it fails to account for the moral dynamic in the cases to which it is applicable. The contention that rights are pro-tanto does not conflict with the substance of the contention that rights are trumps, despite claims of specificationists to the contrary. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner’s argument in this book is bold, imaginative and illuminating, despite being vitiated by some logical errors and a wholly impractical redistributive method.

In contrast to eminent historical philosophers, almost all contemporary philosophers maintain that slavery is impermissible. In the enthusiasm of the Enlightenment, a number of arguments gained currency which were intended to show that contractual slavery is not merely impermissible but impossible. Those arguments are influential today in moral, legal and political philosophy, even in discussions that go beyond the issue of contractual slavery. I explain what slavery is, giving historical and other illustrations. I examine the arguments for the impossibility of (...) contractual slavery propounded in the Enlightenment and their offspring expounded in recent writings, including those by Barnett, Cassirer, Ellerman, Rawls, Roberts-Thomson, Satz and Steiner. I show that they involve confusions between abilities and rights, free will and freedom, directing and doing, what may be true sequentially and what may be true simultaneously, default rights and universal rights, impermissibility and impossibility, and metaphorical and literal uses of language. (shrink)

Frederick R. Steiner (ed): The Essential Ian McHarg: Writings on Design and Nature, 2006 Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-10 DOI 10.1007/s10806-009-9217-y Authors Ruth Beilin, University of Melbourne Landscape Sociologist, Department of Resource Management and Geography, Melbourne School of Land and Environment Melbourne VIC 3010 Australia Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

A critique of the hypothesis of extended cognition.

An anthology of writings by and about Rudolf Steiner qua economist that documents his search for a deeper understanding of modern economic life. This book throws light on many of the problems that face us today, problems that we cannot solve unless we take hold of the economic life in a conscious, human way and resist the temptation to defer to market forces alone. Though well-known as a seer, the idea of Rudolf Steiner as an economist may seem (...) surprising. Seers do not usually have much concrete to say about economic life, beyond laments about its evils and injunctions that it be guided by some moral dimension. Rudolf Steiner, however, gave many lectures and wrote many articles about modern economic life, which he saw as the arena in which humanity has to find a new relationship to the spirituality that formerly came from above or outside -- from churches and external principles. Today the human being has to find morality within, which one cannot fully do unless one takes hold of the economic realm in a conscious, human way. Whether through concrete references to the meaning and working of money, or in attempting to give a fuller understanding of work or of the significance of market economics in our time, Steiner shows himself to be well versed in the subject. This publication presents a selection of his articles in a context of essays by Christopher Houghton Budd. (shrink)

A new approach to understanding the nature of ethics and ethical decision making, not only in the context of business, but also in other life contexts.

One of the very few accounts in English of German idealism, this ambitious work advances and revises our understanding of both the history and the thought of the classical period of German philosophy. As he traces the structure and evolution of idealism as a doctrine, Frederick Beiser exposes a strong objective, or realist, strain running from Kant to Hegel and identifies the crucial role of the early romantics—Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis—as the founders of absolute idealism.

That about sums up what is wrong with Clark's view.

Hegel is one of the major philosophers of the nineteenth century. Many of the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century - from existentialism to analytic philosophy - grew out of reactions against Hegel. He is also one of the hardest philosophers to understand and his complex ideas, though rewarding, are often misunderstood. In this magisterial and lucid introduction, Frederick Beiser covers every major aspect of Hegel's thought. He places Hegel in the historical context of nineteenth-century Germany whilst clarifying (...) the deep insights and originality of Hegel's philosophy. A masterpiece of clarity and scholarship, _Hegel_ is both the ideal starting point for those coming to Hegel for the first time and essential reading for any student or scholar of nineteenth century philosophy. Additional features: glossary chapter summaries chronology annotated further reading. (shrink)

Neo-Kantianism was an important movement in German philosophy of the late 19th century: Frederick Beiser traces its development back to the late 18th century, and explains its rise as a response to three major developments in German culture: the collapse of speculative idealism; the materialism controversy; and the identity crisis of philosophy.

How do creative people think? Do great works of the imagination originate in words or in images? Is there a rational explanation for the sudden appearance of geniuses like Mozart or Einstein? Such questions have fascinated people for centuries; only in recent years, however, has cognitive psychology been able to provide some clues to the mysterious process of creativity. In this revised edition of Notebooks of the Mind, Vera John-Steiner combines imaginative insight with scientific precision to produce a startling (...) account of the human mind working at its highest potential. To approach her subject John-Steiner goes directly to the source, assembling the thoughts of "experienced thinkers"--artists, philosophers, writers, and scientists able to reflect on their own imaginative patterns. More than fifty interviews, along with excerpts from the diaries, letters, and autobiographies of such gifted giants as Leo Tolstoy, Marie Curie, and Diego Rivera, among others, provide illuminating insights into creative activity. We read, for example, of Darwin's preoccupation with the image of nature as a branched tree while working on his concept of evolution. Mozart testifies to the vital influence on his mature art of the wondrous "bag of memories" he retained from childhood. Anais Nin describes her sense of words as oppressive, explaining how imagistic free association freed her as a writer. Adding these personal accounts to laboratory studies of thought process, John-Steiner takes a refreshingly holistic approach to the question of creativity. What emerges is an intriguing demonstration of how specific socio-cultural circumstances interact with certain personality traits to encourage the creative mind. Among the topics examined here are the importance of childhood mentor figures; the lengthy apprenticeship of the talented person; and the development of self- expression through highly individualistic languages, whether in images, movement or inner speech. Now, with a new introduction, this award-winning book provides an uniquely broad-based study of the origins, development and fruits of human inspiration. (shrink)

This is the first full study in English of the German historicist tradition. Frederick C. Beiser surveys the major German thinkers on history from the middle of the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, providing an introduction to each thinker and the main issues in interpreting and appraising his thought. The volume offers new interpretations of well-known philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Max Weber, and introduces others who are scarcely known at all, including J. A. Chladenius, (...) Justus Möser, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask. Beyond an exploration of the historical and intellectual context of each thinker, Beiser illuminates the sources and reasons for the movement of German historicism—one of the great revolutions in modern Western thought, and the source of our historical understanding of the human world. (shrink)

Weltschmerz is a study of the pessimism that dominated German philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pessimism was essentially the theory that life is not worth living, and was introduced into German philosophy by Schopenhauer. Frederick C. Beiser examines the intense and long controversy that arose from Schopenhauer's pessimism, which changed the agenda of philosophy in Germany away from the logic of the sciences and toward an examination of the value of life. He examines the major (...) defenders of pessimism and its chief critics, especially Eugen Dühring and the neo-Kantians. The pessimism dispute of the second half of the century has been largely ignored in secondary literature and this book is a first attempt since the 1880s to re-examine it and to analyze the important philosophical issues raised by it. The dispute concerned the most fundamental philosophical issue of them all: whether life is worth living. (shrink)

Diotima's Children is a re-examination of the rationalist tradition of aesthetics which prevailed in Germany in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Frederick C. Beiser presents the first book to be written on two of the most important idealist philosophers in Germany after Hegel: Adolf Trendelenburg and Rudolf Lotze. Beiser addresses every aspect of their philosophy-- logic, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics--and traces their intellectual development from their youth until their death.

Fred Beiser, renowned as one of the world's leading historians of German philosophy, presents a brilliant new study of Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), rehabilitating him as a philosopher worthy of serious attention. Beiser shows, in particular, that Schiller's engagement with Kant is far more subtle and rewarding than is often portrayed. Promising to be a landmark in the study of German thought, Schiller as Philosopher will be compulsory reading for any philosopher, historian, or literary scholar engaged with the key developments (...) of this fertile period. (shrink)

The Early Romantics met resistance from artists and academics alike in part because they defied the conventional wisdom that philosophy and the arts must be kept separate. Indeed, as the literary component of Romanticism has been studied and celebrated in recent years, its philosophical aspect has receded from view. This book, by one of the most respected scholars of the Romantic era, offers an explanation of Romanticism that not only restores but enhances understanding of the movement's origins, development, aims, and (...) accomplishments--and of its continuing relevance. Poetry is in fact the general ideal of the Romantics, Frederick Beiser tells us, but only if poetry is understood not just narrowly as poems but more broadly as things made by humans. Seen in this way, poetry becomes a revolutionary ideal that demanded--and still demands--that we transform not only literature and criticism but all the arts and sciences, that we break down the barriers between art and life, so that the world itself becomes "romanticized." Romanticism, in the view Beiser opens to us, does not conform to the contemporary division of labor in our universities and colleges; it requires a multifaceted approach of just the sort outlined in this book. (shrink)

People intend to do things, try to do things, and do things. Do they also will to do things? More precisely, if people will to do things and their willing bears upon what they do, is willing, or volition, something distinct from intending and trying? This question is central to the intention/volition debate, a debate about the ingredients of the best theory of the nature and explanation of human action. A variety of competing conceptions of volition, intention, and trying have (...) been advanced in the literature; it would be impossible to examine each thoroughly in a single paper. We can show, however, that the major functional roles ascribed to volition are nicely filled by a triad composed of intention, trying, and information feedback. Sections I and II below develop an account of the connection between intention and trying. Section III examines leading arguments for the existence of volitions and decomposes volitions into members of the triad just identified. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga has famously responded to the logical problem of evil by appealing to the intrinsic value of significant free will. A problem, however, arises because traditional theists believe that both God and the redeemed who go to heaven cannot do wrong acts. This entails that both God and the redeemed in heaven lack significant freedom. If significant freedom is indeed valuable, then God and the redeemed in heaven would lack something intrinsically valuable. However, if significant freedom is not intrinsically (...) valuable, then Plantinga’s reply to the logical problem of evil fails. In this paper, we assess three contemporary solutions to the dilemma above. The first is the love solution, which proposes that significant freedom is necessary for agents to love, and loving others is intrinsically good. The second is the soul-making solution, which argues that significant freedom is necessary for self-developing one’s moral character, and having a self-developed moral character is intrinsically good. The third is the derivative free will solution, which argues that significant freedom is necessary for derivative free will in heaven, and derivative free will is intrinsically good. We raise problems against all three solutions and instead defend a fourth solution – the ultimate responsibility solution. That is, significant freedom is instrumentally valuable as it gives agents ultimate responsibility with regards to morally significant acts. Finally, we defend the ultimate responsibility solution against two major objections. (shrink)

This book is an account of the philosophical movement named Lebensphilosophie, which flourished at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. There many philosophers who participated in the movement, but this book concentrates on the three most important: Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel. The movement was called Lebensphilosophie—literally, philosophy of life—because its main interest was not life as a biological phenomenon but life as it is lived by human beings. They regarded human life (...) and experience as the fundamental reality, the basis of all knowledge and value, and disputed the relevance of any supernatural realm transcending human experience. The purpose of life was therefore life itself. Lebensphilosophie was the first modern philosophical movement in the Western tradition. It was “modern” in the sense that it was entirely humanist and secular, deriving all values from a non-religious perspective. Nietzsche, Dilthey and Simmel were either atheists or agnostics; they denied the relevance of any transcendent reality or being for human life. They abjured the traditional Christian concern with salvation and immortality. They also disputed the existence of natural law, teleology or a providential order; human beings created their own values and they did not conform to any made by nature. In anticipation of later existentialism, the Lebensphilosophen maintained that human beings are the makers of their own fate. Contrary to pessimism, they affirmed the great value of life while still acknowledging its frequent tragedy. The Lebensphilosophen were champions of an individualist ethics, which maintained that the highest good for a human being was self-realization, the development of a persons’s unique individuality. Their ethics was neither utilitarian nor de-ontological: it was not utilitarian because it did not regard the highest good as pleasure; self-realization could be a very unpleasant experience; and it was not de-ontological because it grounded moral norms upon the facts of human development and experience. The Lebensphilosophen were major advocates of historicism. They believed that human experience is formed by history, and that its horizons and limits are historical. Just as it was impossible to transcend human experience, so it was impossible to transcend history. All values and norms were therefore historical. In attempting to describe historical experience, the Lebensphilosophen developed the discipline of hermeneutics. They refused to accept mechanical explanation as a paradigm of explanation. This book attempts to describe and analyze the fundamental aspects of Lebensphilosophie by looking in detail at the views of its three leading figures. It examines their ethics, their religious background, their responses to pessimism and relativism, and their contributions to hermeneutics and historicism. (shrink)

This book is the first complete intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen and the only work to cover all his major philosophical and Jewish writings. Frederick C. Beiser pays special attention to all phases of Cohen's intellectual development, its breaks and its continuities, throughout seven decades. The guiding goal behind Cohen's intellectual career, he argues, was the development of a radical rationalism, one committed to defending the rights of unending enquiry and unlimited criticism. Cohen's philosophy was therefore an attempt to (...) defend and revive the Enlightenment belief in the authority of reason; his critical idealism an attempt to justify this belief and to establish a purely rational worldview. According to this interpretation, Cohen's thought is resolutely opposed to any form of irrationalism or mysticism because these would impose arbitrary and artificial limits on criticism and enquiry. It is therefore critical of those interpretations which see Cohen's philosophy as a species of proto-existentialism or Jewish mysticism. Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography attempts to unify the two sides of Cohen's thought, his philosophy and his Judaism. Maintaining that Cohen's Judaism was not a limit to his radical rationalism but a consistent development of it, Beiser contends that his religion was one of reason. He concludes that most critical interpretations have failed to appreciate the philosophical depth and sophistication of his Judaism, a religion which committed the believer to the unending search for truth and the striving to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of reason. (shrink)

The analysis of function-ascribing statements, such as “the function of x is y”, is proving to be a difficult matter. It is difficult because we are only beginning to see the complexity which is involved in ascribing functions. The process of discovery has been slow and tedious, with each newly constructed analysis of the meaning of functional ascriptions yielding insights into the structure of functional analysis and functional explanation. However, as each analysis is, in turn, dismantled, we seem to see (...) our insights slip away. In the wake of each exchange, a new member is added to the list of desiderata for an analysis of function-ascribing statements. Thus, the matter of finding a proper analysis of function attributions becomes more and more complex. (shrink)

Following Wiggins’ seminal article, On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time, this article presents the first comprehensive account of the relation of material constitution, an asymmetrical, transitive relation which totally orders distinct ‘entities’ (individuals, pluralities or masses of stuff) which ‘spatially coincide.’ Their coincidence in space is explained by a recursive definition of ‘complete-composition’, weaker than strict mereological indiscernibility, which also explains the variety of logically independent similarities in such cases. This account is ‘analytical’, dealing with ‘putative’ (...) cases in general. The main strategy is to rationally reconstruct Aristotle’s notion of material cause. It is developed more fully with a theory of how to justify admitting generable and perishable things into the natural world, in The Kinds of Things: A Theory of Personal Identity Based on Transcendental Argument (Open Court, 1996). (shrink)

This book is the first translation into English of the Reflections which Kant wrote whilst formulating his ideas in political philosophy: the preparatory drafts for Theory and Practice, Toward Perpetual Peace, the Doctrine of Right, and Conflict of the Faculties; and the only surviving student transcription of his course on Natural Right. Through these texts one can trace the development of his political thought, from his first exposure to Rousseau in the mid 1760s through to his last musings in the (...) late 1790s after his final system of Right was published. The material covers such topics as the central role of freedom, the social contract, the nature of sovereignty, the means for achieving international peace, property rights in relation to the very possibility of human agency, the general prohibition of rebellion, and Kant's philosophical defense of the French Revolution. (shrink)

In this comprehensive assessment of Kant's metaethics, Frederick Rauscher shows that Kant is a moral idealist rather than a moral realist and argues that Kant's ethics does not require metaphysical commitments that go beyond nature. Rauscher frames the argument in the context of Kant's non-naturalistic philosophical method and the character of practical reason as action-oriented. Reason operates entirely within nature, and apparently non-natural claims - God, free choice, and value - are shown to be heuristic and to reflect reason's (...) ordering of nature. The book shows how Kant hesitates between a transcendental moral idealism with an empirical moral realism and a complete moral idealism. Examining every aspect of Kant's ethics, from the categorical imperative to freedom and value, this volume argues that Kant's focus on human moral agency explains morality as a part of nature. It will appeal to academic researchers and advanced students of Kant, German idealism and intellectual history. (shrink)

The ethical principle of autonomy is among the most fundamental in ethics, and it is particularly salient for those in public health, who must constantly balance the desire to improve health outcomes by changing behavior with respect for individual freedom. Although there are some areas in which there is a genuine tension between public health and autonomy—childhood vaccine mandates, for example—there are many more areas where not only is there no tension, but public health and autonomy come down to the (...) same thing. These areas of overlap are often rendered invisible by a thin understanding of autonomy. Better integrating newer theoretical insights about autonomy into applied ethics can make discussions of public health ethics more rigorous, incisive, and effective. Even more importantly, bringing modern concepts of autonomy into public health ethics can showcase the many areas in which public health and autonomy have the same goals, face the same threats, and can be mutually advanced by the same kinds of solutions. This article provides a schema for relational autonomy in a public health context and gives concrete examples of how autonomy can be served through public-health interventions. It marshals insights from sociology, psychology, and philosophy to advance a theory of autonomy and coercion that recognizes three potential threats to autonomy: threats to choice sets, threats to knowledge, and threats to preferences. (shrink)

Can we feel emotions about abstract objects, assuming that abstract objects exist? I argue that at least some emotions can have abstract objects as their intentional objects and discuss why this conclusion is not just trivially true. Through critical engagement with the work of Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, I devote special attention to awe, an emotion that is particularly well suited to show that some emotions can be about either concrete or abstract objects. In responding to a possible objection, (...) according to which we can only feel emotions about things that we take to matter to our flourishing, and thus cannot feel emotions about causally inefficacious abstract objects, I explore how abstract objects can be relevant to human flourishing and discuss someemotions other than awe that can be about abstract objects. I finish by explaining somereasons why my conclusion matters, including the fact that it presents a challenge to perceptual theories of emotion and causal theories of intentionality. (shrink)

Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half--when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the (...) very absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period's five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century. (shrink)

Few thinkers are more controversial in the history of philosophy than Hegel. He has been dismissed as a charlatan and obscurantist, but also praised as one of the greatest thinkers in modern philosophy. No one interested in philosophy can afford to ignore him. This volume considers all the major aspects of Hegel's work: epistemology, logic, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion. Special attention is devoted to problems in the interpretation of Hegel: the unity of the Phenomenology (...) of Spirit; the value of the dialectical method; the status of his logic; the nature of his politics. A final group of chapters treats Hegel's complex historical legacy: the development of Hegelianism and its growth into a left and right-wing school; the relation of Hegel and Marx; and the subtle connections between Hegel and contemporary analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper considers the debate over how we attribute beliefs, desires, and other mental states to our fellows. Do we employ a theory of mind? Or do we use simulational brain mechanisms, but employ no theory? One point of dispute between these theories focuses upon our ability to have empathic knowledge of the mind of another. I consider whether an argument posed by Ravenscroft settles the debate in favor of Simulation Theory. I suggest that the consideration of empathy does not (...) settle the dispute. Then I look at recent results from false memory research and other research employing neural imaging. I suggest that new discoveries there may help shape the future of the empirical dimension of the debate. (shrink)