Near Eastern Tribal Societies during the Nineteenth Century: Economy, Society and Politics between Tent and Town. By Eveline van der Steen. London: Equinox, 2013. Pp. xvii + 302. $110. [Distributed by ISD, Bristol, Conn.].

Économiquement, l'heure est dit-on à la reprise, gouverner consisterait à remettre le pays sur ses rails et s'opposer à ce que l'air du temps peut présenter d'intolérable exigerait dans l'instant de repartir au combat. Mais que peuvent bien signifier ces verbes, reprendre, remettre, ou repartir? À quelles complications et à quelles hantises s'affrontent nos tentatives intimes ou politiques pour surmonter déceptions et défaites, doutes et empêchements, jusqu'à trouver la force d'agir à nouveau? Les philosophes se sont souvent penchés sur les (...) premiers commencements de toutes choses; on voudrait ici, en compagnie de penseurs et d'écrivains, interroger plutôt les deuxièmes coups, les nouvelles fois, sonder leurs pièges et leurs promesses, et explorer l'expérience individuelle ou collective du recommencement comme on se recoudrait une éthique en guettant le retour des beaux jours."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Pain may appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory. After categorizing versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an 'objectivist' and 'non-mentalist' version is the most promising, if it can withstand two objections concerning what we say when in pain, and the distinctiveness of pain. I rebut these objections, in a way available to both opponents of and adherents to (...) the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to explain one of the most controversial views attributed to the Stoic Chrysippus: that the impossible can follow from the possible. My solution finds in Chrysippus a distinction later made by the medieval logician John Buridan: that between being possible (there being a state of affairs that may occur) and being possibly-true (there being some proposition whose truth-conditions are that state of affairs). Buridan and Chrysippus have radically opposing views on the nature of propositions. What (...) their conceptions share is the conclusion that at least some propositions must be contingent beings. They argue for this while maintaining a rigorous commitment to the view that propositions are strictly bivalent. In 2. I explain the Chrysippean passage in terms of a distinction Buridan makes explicitly. In 3. I show how the distinction follows implicitly from the Stoic theory of quantification. In 4. I compare the modality with other aspects of Stoic logic. In 5. I discuss how the distinction behaves in the future tense. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn objects that Wittgenstein's private language argument overlooks the possibility that a private linguist can equip himself with a criterion of correctness by confirming generalizations about the patterns in which his private sensations occur. Crispin Wright responds that appropriate generalizations would be too few to be interesting. But I show that Wright's calculations are upset by his failure to appreciate both the richness of the data and the range of theories that would be available to the private linguist.

This Paper Offers A New Interpretation of Phaedo 96a–103a. Plato has devoted the dialogue up to this point to a series of arguments for the claim that the soul is immortal. However, one of the characters, Cebes, insists that so far nothing more has been established than that the soul is durable, divine, and in existence before the incarnation of birth. What is needed is something more ambitious: a proof that the soul is not such as to pass out of (...) existence. According to Socrates’s initial response to Cebes at 95e8–96a1, giving such a demonstration requires a thorough investigation into “the reason for coming to be and passing away in general” (ὅλως γὰϱ δεῖ πεϱὶ γενέσεως ϰαὶ Φθοϱᾶς τὴν αἰτίαν διαπϱαγματεύσασθαι .. (shrink)

This paper is a brief discussion of the famous 'Third Man Argument' as it appears in Plato's dialogue Parmenides . I mention, criticise and refine the most influential analytic approach to the argument; show that the actual conclusion of the argument is different from the one attributed to it by the majority of scholars; and elaborate two responses to the argument, both of which shed interesting light on the Theory of Forms.

Contemporary bioethical theory relies upon the concept of informed consent to protect against abuses of patient autonomy. Due to the complexity of the informed consent process, however, many patients rely more on their trust in their health care providers than they do upon their own ability to decide whether or not to give informed consent. Reformation theologian John Calvin placed a strong emphasis on the decision-maker's duty to respect the trust that others repose in the decision-maker. In keeping with Calvin's (...) concept of the duty to honor that trust, bioethics would do well to complement its current emphasis on informed consent with an emphasis on the protection of patient trust. (shrink)

Jehovah's Witnesses are students of the Bible. They refuse transfusions out of obedience to the scriptural directive to abstain and keep from blood. Dr Muramoto disagrees with the Witnesses' religious beliefs in this regard. Despite this basic disagreement over the meaning of Biblical texts, Muramoto flouts the religious basis for the Witnesses' position. His proposed policy change about accepting transfusions in private not only conflicts with the Witnesses' fundamental beliefs but it promotes hypocrisy. In addition, Muramoto's arguments about pressure to (...) conform and coerced disclosure of private information misrepresent the beliefs and practices of Jehovah's Witnesses and ignore the element of individual conscience. In short, Muramoto resorts to distortion and uncorroborated assertions in his effort to portray a matter of religious faith as a matter of medical ethical debate. (shrink)

The self seems to be a unitary entity remaining stable across time. Nevertheless, current theorizing conceptualizes the self as a number of interacting sub-systems involving perception, intention and action (self-model). One important function of such a self-model is to distinguish between events occurring as a result of one's own actions and events occurring as the result of somebody else's actions. We conducted an fMRI experiment that compared brain activation after an abrupt mismatch between one's own movement and its visual consequences (...) with an abrupt mismatch between one's own movement and somebody else's visually perceived hand movement. A right fronto-parietal network was selectively active during a sudden mismatch between one's own observed and performed hand action. (shrink)

Dictionary of Viśiṣṭādvaita school in Hindu philosophy.

The papers in this volume bring together a number of scholars working on topics ranging from contemporary ethics to the history of philosophy. This wide scope reflects the comprehensive nature of Dietrich von Hildebrand's philosophic vision. His career includes foundational works on such subjects as ethics, philosophical method, aesthetics, and the nature of love. One struggles to imagine how Hildebrand managed to fit all this into a life that also includes extensive anti-Nazi political activism during World War II. Within this (...) broad scope of Hildebrand's work, one finds a number of important philosophical problems that beg for further development, such as his conception of personal existence, his rich and pluralistic conception of beauty, or his distinction between person and personality. In several places, however, the development of Hildebrand's thought must involve a correction or even an outright challenge to his reasoning. Each of these papers does just this, applying the insights of Hildebrand to a number of diverse philosophical problems, while also advancing and challenging his thought in various ways. Despite this wide diversity, three central issues appear again and again in these papers, and represent some of Hildebrand's most important contributions to philosophy: (i) his method of phenomenological realism, (ii) his conception of value and value-response, and (iii) his personalism. I want to provide here a brief sketch of these three areas to orient the reader before approaching the more technical details of each essay. (shrink)

On one reading, twentieth century Christian personalists such as Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, or Edith Stein merely translate into Christian terms a set of modern concerns that arise apart from and are at odds with the historical Christian tradition. According to this reading, modern philosophy makes a fundamental break with previous thinking when it turns inward to examine the interior, personal dimension of existence. A person who favors this inward turn will see the Christian personalists as vainly attempting to (...) salvage traditional Christian categories while trying to keep up with the times. For example, someone who favors twentieth century existentialism or psychoanalysis may sympathize with a Christian personalist account of the interiority and irreplaceable uniqueness of each person but despise the larger religious framework of grace and salvation. Someone who favors traditional metaphysics, by contrast, may see these personalists as falling prey to modern errors when they should have kept the faith. Such a traditionalist may think, for example, that an emphasis on the personal is an infiltration into Christianity from secular political philosophies of individualism and that this has been thinly covered over with traditional Christian language. -/- Both perspectives, however, ignore the historical roots of personalism much further back in the history of philosophy than Descartes and Kant. Central to this history is the idea that each person uniquely realizes an incommunicable dimension of his existence, irreducible to the category of nature or essence. While we are in nature and while we *are* a nature, our nature as nature remains purely general, describing *what* we are in common with every other member of our species. As particular persons exercising our freedom and spiritual existence, however, each of us concretizes that purely general nature in a unique, personal way. For many centuries, Christians have called the dimension that concretizes nature ὑπόστασις: each ὑπόστασις is a distinct realization of a general nature. When this notion is first introduced into Christian discourse during the second half of the fourth century, the uniqueness of persons as opposed to the uniqueness of individual pebbles or horses does not come fully into focus. Nevertheless, a thick conception of ὑπόστασις develops in order to speak precisely about Trinitarian and Christological theology, and this context gives it a distinctly personalist character, especially when it is translated into Latin as *persona*. In order to speak of God as three ὑποστάσεις or *personae* in one essence and to speak of Christ as one ὑπόστασις or *persona* in two natures, the category of ὑπόστασις must be irreducible to the category of nature. Along this irreducible dimension persons are irreplaceable *someones* in relationship with other someones rather than merely *somethings*, specimens of a kind more or less interchangeable with any other such specimen. (shrink)