Exploring the history of contemporary legal thought on the rights and status of the West's colonized indigenous tribal peoples, Williams here traces the development of the themes that justified and impelled Spanish, English, and American conquests of the New World.

This paper considers W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story, “Jesus Christ in Texas,” in the perspective of his analysis of the concept of beauty in Darkwater (1920); his exposition of the idea that “all art is propaganda” in “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926); and his moral psychology of white supremacy. On my account, Du Bois holds that beautiful art can help to undermine white supremacy by using representations of moral goodness to expand the white supremacist’s ethical horizons. To defend this thesis, (...) he relies on an image of “the cross and the lynching tree” to revise imagery that he draws from Albrecht Dürer’s 1504 painting, “The Adoration of Kings.”. (shrink)

The main aim of this work was initially a modest one, 'to collect information as to the main facts of Hutcheson's life in Dublin prior to his appointment as Professor at Glasgow'. As the materials grew, however, and Scott's interest in Hutcheson deepened, the planned article expanded into a book that has since become the standard biography. The emphasis throughout is on the development of Hurcheson's thought in the context of an ongoing debate with his contemporaries.

I formulate a counterfactual version of the notorious 'Ramsey Test'. Whereas the Ramsey Test for indicative conditionals links credence in indicatives to conditional credences, the counterfactual version links credence in counterfactuals to expected conditional chance. I outline two forms: a Ramsey Identity on which the probability of the conditional should be identical to the corresponding conditional probabihty/expectation of chance; and a Ramsey Bound on which credence in the conditional should never exceed the latter.Even in the weaker, bound, form, the counterfactual (...) Ramsey Test makes counterfactuals subject to the very argument that Lewis used to argue against the indicative version of the Ramsey Test. I compare the assumptions needed to run each, pointing to assumptions about the time-evolution of chances that can replace the appeal to Bayesian assumptions about credence update in motivating the assumptions of the argument.I finish by outlining two reactions to the discussion: to indicativize the debate on counterfactuals; or to counterfactualize the debate on indicatives. (shrink)

In arguing that Nietzsche's _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_ is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism—that is, of the possibility of radical cultural change through the creation of new values—the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy. Nietzsche takes up the problem of modernism by inventing Zarathustra, a self-styled cultural innovator who aspires to subvert the culture of modernity by creating new values. By showing how Zarathustra can become a creator of new values, notwithstanding the forces (...) that hinder his will to innovate, Nietzsche answers the skeptic who proclaims that new-values creation is impossible. _Zarathustra_ is a story of repeated clashes between Zarathustra's avant-garde, modernist intentions and figures of doubt who condemn those intentions. Through a close reading of _Zarathustra_, the author reconstructs Nietzsche's explanation of the possibility of modernism. Showing how parody, irony, and plot organization frame that explanation, he also demonstrates the central significance of Zarathustra's speeches on the body and the will to power. The author argues that Nietzsche's critique of the modern philosophy of the subject revises Kant's concept of the dynamical sublime and makes allegorical use of the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and Dionysus. He also proposes an original interpretation of the thought of eternal recurrence. Breaking with conventional Nietzsche scholarship, the author conceptualizes the thought not as a theoretical or a practical doctrine that Nietzsche endorses, but as a developing drama that Zarathustra performs. (shrink)

Despite the growing interest in Aristotelian approaches to contemporary philosophy of science, few metaphysicians have engaged directly with the question of how a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of nature might change the landscape for theological discussion concerning theology and naturalism, the place of human beings within nature, or the problem of divine causality. The chapters in this volume are collected into three thematic sections: Naturalism and Nature, Mind and Nature, and God and Nature. By pushing the current boundaries of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics to (...) recover the traditional notion of substantial forms in physics, reframe the principle of proportionality in biology, and restore the hierarchy of being familiar to ancient philosophy, this book advances a metaphysically unified framework that accommodates both scientific and theological knowledge, enriching the interaction between science, philosophy and theology. Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science, natural theology, philosophical theology, and analytic theology. (shrink)

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will makes a series of arguments that certain human behaviors are impossible to explain in the absence of free will, and that free will emerges from materialistic processes of brain function. It outlines future directions for neuroscience studies that can harness emerging technologies and tools for systems-level analysis."--Page 4 of cover.

In this significant contribution to Hegel scholarship, Robert Williams develops the most comprehensive account to date of Hegel's concept of recognition. Fichte introduced the concept of recognition as a presupposition of both Rousseau's social contract and Kant's ethics. Williams shows that Hegel appropriated the concept of recognition as the general pattern of his concept of ethical life, breaking with natural law theory yet incorporating the Aristotelian view that rights and virtues are possible only within a certain kind of community. (...) He explores Hegel's intersubjective concept of spirit as the product of affirmative mutual recognition and his conception of recognition as the right to have rights. Examining Hegel's Jena manuscripts, his _Philosophy of Right_, the _Phenomenology of Spirit_, and other works, Williams shows how the concept of recognition shapes and illumines Hegel's understandings of crime and punishment, morality, the family, the state, sovereignty, international relations, and war. A concluding chapter on the reception and reworking of the concept of recognition by contemporary thinkers including Derrida, Levinas, and Deleuze demonstrates Hegel's continuing centrality to the philosophical concerns of our age. (shrink)

The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics. For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim (...) Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing “self-realization” that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois’s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller’s social thought, the German debate over the Geisteswissenschaften, and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs Souls’ defense of this “politics of expressive self-realization,” and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in My Bondage and My Freedom. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois’s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to Bondage and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from Souls, Gooding-Williams lets Souls serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America. (shrink)

Although the Evans argument against vague identity has been much discussed, proposah for blocking it have not so far satisfied general conditions which any solution ought to meet. Moreover, the relation between ontically vague identity and ontic vagueness more generally has not yet been satisfactorily addressed. I advocate a way of resisting the Evans argument which satisfies the conditions. To show how this approach can vindicate particular cases of ontically vague identity, I develop a framework for describing ontic vagueness in (...) general in terms of multiple actualities. This provides aprìncipled approach to ontically vague identity which is unaffected by the Evans argument. (shrink)

This volume brings together a wide-ranging collection of seventeen essays, most of which were published elsewhere during the last ten or so years and some of which appear here in revised versions. Its subtitle is somewhat misleading, because Keeping Faith is neither a sustained philosophical discussion of American racial identities nor an extended argument to the effect that some noteworthy assumptions about race have helped to shape the history of American philosophical thought. Still, many of the book’s chapters explicitly engage (...) the theme of race, while others touch on traditional and familiar philosophical problems. (shrink)

This paper posits that organizational variables are the factors that lead to the moral decline of companies like Enron and Worldcom. The individuals involved created environments within the organizations that precipitated a spiral of unethical decision-making. It is proposed that at the executive level, it is the organizational factors associated with power and decision-making that have the critical influence on moral and ethical behavior. The study has used variables that were deemed to be surrogate measures of the ethical violations (OSHA (...) and EPA violations), the risky shift phenomenon (executive team size), banality of wrong-doing (reputation score for firms) and escalating commitment (tenure with the firm/change in revenue for declining firms). The research found that there were small correlations between ethical violations and the three organizational variables. (shrink)

Investigates the concept of recognition (anerkennen) under which term the German idealists discussed the Other, intersubjectivity, the interhuman.

During Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm, USNS Mercy was one of two American hospital ships deployed to the Persian Gulf. She arrived in the Gulf on 15 September 1990, following a 12,000-mile transit from her homeport of Oakland, California, and remained on station until 18 March 1991, when she passed through the Straits of Hormuz on her return voyage home. During the height of her deployment, Mercy was staffed with nearly 1,200 men and women, including physicians, nurses, dentists, (...) representatives of affiliated health-care disciplines, hospital corpsmen, dental technicians, healthcare administrators, chaplains, and various nonmedical support personnel. The staff included a mix of active duty military providers and recalled reservists. (shrink)

John Hawthorne in a recent paper takes issue with Lewisian accounts of counterfactuals, when relevant laws of nature are chancy. I respond to his arguments on behalf of the Lewisian, and conclude that while some can be rebutted, the case against the original Lewisian account is strong.I develop a neo-Lewisian account of what makes for closeness of worlds. I argue that my revised version avoids Hawthorne’s challenges. I argue that this is closer to the spirit of Lewis’s first (non-chancy) proposal (...) than is Lewis’s own suggested modification. (shrink)

Robert R. Williams offers a bold new account of divergences and convergences in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche. He explores four themes - the philosophy of tragedy; recognition and community; critique of Kant; and the death of God - and explicates both thinkers' critiques of traditional theology and metaphysics.

This study examined the relationship between the proportion of women serving on firms' boards of directors and the extent to which these same firms engaged in charitable giving activities. Using a sample of 185 Fortune 500 firms for the 1991-1994 time period, the results provide strong support for the notion that firms having a higher proportion of women serving on their boards do engage in charitable giving to a greater extent than firms having a lower proportion of women serving on (...) their boards. Further, the results suggest a link between the percentage of women on boards and firm philanthropy in the areas of community service and the arts, but found no link between women boardmembers and firm giving to support education or public policy issues. The implications of the findings and some areas for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Explores convergences between the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and African American thought.

In the remarks that follow I concentrate on Lorenzo Simpson's two books, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity and The Unfinished Project: Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism. Common to both works — what unites them, I believe — is a philosophical orientation that has been deeply influenced by Gadamerian hermeneutics. I begin with a discussion of UP.

Are counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents automatically true? That is, is Conjunction Conditionalization: if (X & Y), then (X > Y) valid? Stalnaker and Lewis think so, but many others disagree. We note here that the extant arguments for Conjunction Conditionalization are unpersuasive, before presenting a family of more compelling arguments. These arguments rely on some standard theorems of the logic of counterfactuals as well as a plausible and popular semantic claim about certain semifactuals. Denying Conjunction Conditionalization, then, requires (...) rejecting other aspects of the standard logic of counterfactuals, or else our intuitive picture of semifactuals. (shrink)

Arthur Danto invokes his philosophy of history to authorize a reading of Nietzsche that his philosophy of history nevertheless undermines. Danto's Nietzsche was a system builder, for, “if only tacitly,” he submitted his thinking to the demands of the philosophical “discipline,” “where there is no such thing as an isolated solution to an isolated problem”. In his Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto invents a character he dubs “the Ideal Chronicler.” Danto's notion of a narrative sentence clarifies his idea that historical (...) understanding is retrospective; that it is a matter of assigning significance to earlier events in light of later ones – thus, a matter of placing earlier events within a story we wish to tell. Danto attributes the structural coherence of Nietzsche's writings both to historical understanding and to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)