Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst conservative politicians and journalists, there is a near-consensus amongst scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Like the hole in the ozone layer as described by Bruno Latour, global warming is a ‘hybrid’ natural-social-discursive phenomenon. And science fiction seems to occupy a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. This paper takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom dubs ‘cli-fi’. (...) It seeks to describe how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. It argues against the view that ‘catastrophic’ SF is best understood as a variant of the kind of ‘apocalyptic’ fiction inspired by the Christian Book of Revelation, or Apokalypsis, on the grounds that this tends to downplay the historical novelty of SF as a genre defined primarily in relation to modern science and technology. And it examines the narrative strategies pursued in both print and audio-visual SF texts that deal with anthropogenic climate change. (shrink)

Charles Griswold has written a comprehensive philosophical study of Smith's moral and political thought. Griswold sets Smith's work in the context of the Enlightenment and relates it to current discussions in moral and political philosophy. Smith's appropriation as well as criticism of ancient philosophy, and his carefully balanced defence of a liberal and humane moral and political outlook, are also explored. This 1999 book is a major philosophical and historical reassessment of a key figure in the Enlightenment that will be (...) of particular interest to philosophers and political and legal theorists, as well as historians of ideas, rhetoric, and political economy. (shrink)

In a pessimistic view, the world is a series of struggles and sufferings. The tribulations are inevitable to man’s life for he is in the world. Pandemic, poverty and corruption are the most prominent and prevailing faces of struggles in the world. It affects the individual’s lives deeply for it undercuts the experience of being alive and free. It weakens man’s appreciation of moments due to misery. The conflicts in the world holds man to appreciate moments for they are occupied (...) on their functionality. The world simply becomes a mechanical for the people lives like a machine where working is much important than reflecting. These problematic figures were paralleled to Gabriel Marcel’s concept of broken world. The paper tends to justify that the world is broken for the reason that first, its problems that could be seen in the contemporary world as pandemic, poverty and corruption. Second, man becomes alienated from himself for he ceases on living due to this problematic world. This paper also ventured to Gabriel Marcel’s concept of broken world which eventually paralleled to the mainstream problems in contemporary world. The author intended to present a pessimistic view about the world which he claimed to be mad and broken. (shrink)

This book traces the historical lineages of Alvin Plantinga’s religious epistemology from Plato through Augustine and Calvin. It focuses upon this epistemology as a philosophical interpretation of what is generally taken to be a narrow theological doctrine. The author provides a textually based and closely reasoned introduction to the epistemological ideas of Plato, Augustine, Calvin, Plantinga, and several other writers and shows the continuity of a certain approach to the knowledge of God; it may be called the Platonic—Augustinian—Reformed approach.

The spatial organization of the genome is intimately linked to its biological function, yet our understanding of higher order genomic structure is coarse, fragmented and incomplete. In the nucleus of eukaryotic cells, interphase chromosomes occupy distinct.

Some people have found my distinction between meaning and significance useful. In the following revision of that distinction, I hope to improve its accuracy and perhaps, therefore, its utility as well. My impulse for making the revision has been my realization, very gradually achieved, that meaning is not simply an affair of consciousness and unconsciousness. In 1967, in Validity in Interpretation, I roundly asserted that “there is no magic land of meanings outside human consciousness.” 1 That assertion would be true (...) if, godlike, we could oversee the whole of human consciousness, past, present, and future. But we language users, being limited creatures, intend our verbal meanings to go beyond what we can pay attention to at any moment. We intend our meanings to transcend our momentary limitations of attention and knowledge. Hence there is a land of meanings beyond past and present human consciousness—the land of the future. What I should have said originally is that there is no magic lance of meanings beyond the whole extent of human consciousness, past, present, and future. This correction of my original statements leads to a deepening of the concept of meaning.In 1960 I first proposed the analytical distinction between two aspects of textual interpretation. One of them, meaning, was fixed and immutable; the other, significance, was open to change.2 I acknowledged that significance, changeable or not, is the more valuable object of interpretation, because it typically embraces the present use of texts, and present use is present value. But I argued that, in academic criticism, the significance and use of a text ought to be rooted in its fixed meaning, since otherwise criticism would lack a stable object of inquiry and would merely float on tides of preference. The claim that one reader’s opinion is as valid as another’s would then be right, despite any indignant protest to the contrary. I did not wish to dissuade people from floating on the tides of preference if that was what they wished to do. I intended to provide a firm justification for those who wished to pursue historical scholarship. 3 I also assumed that even those who did not pursue historical scholarship might sometimes wish to exploit the possibility of historically fixed meaning. In my experience, even antiauthorial theorists sometimes with to regard their own texts as having a historically fixed meaning and will complain if someone misunderstands that meaning. 1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation, p. 4.2. See my “Objective Interpretation,” PMLA 75 : 463-79.3. See, for instance, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, which ends:We submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a second kind of critic to undertake: the way of biographical or genetic inquiry …. Our point is that such an answer to such an inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem “Prufrock”; it would not be a critical inquiry. Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle. [P. 18] E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous works, including Validity in Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Against Interpretation?”, “The Politics of Theories of Interpretation, and “Stylistics and Synonymity”. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper develops a framework for examining decision making about ethical issues and tests the applicability of a social contract perspective. Using two separate samples of students and salespeople, we determine that community members (salespeople) tend to judge a potentially unethical act to constitute a violation of an implicit social contract and non-community members (students) do not. Also, consistent with the emphasis on context specificity of integrative social contracts theory, situational variables influence perceptions of ethicality for the community members, but (...) do not affect the perceptions of individuals outside the community. The study finds considerable support for the use of a social contractarian perspective in the study of decision-making processes about ethical issues. (shrink)

This essay is a defense of the social construction of racialism. I follow a standard definition of “racialism” which is the belief that “there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with other members of any other race”. In particular I want to (...) defend the “radical” social-constructive thesis that holds “the concept of race is exclusively the product of historical and cultural causes. It claims that humans do not tend to classify people into races when groups with different phenotypes meet, save for particular historical circumstances”. The quoted position is the consensus view among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists who study racialism but has recently been criticized by philosophical defenders of cognitive/evolutionary psychological approaches to racialism. Drawing on developmental studies as well as historical and contemporary cross-cultural research, CEP philosophers point to similarities of racialism across time and space. They hold that social constructionist approaches to racialism cannot explain these similarities. I hold that SC approaches do explain these similarities and that such similarities actually pose a significant challenge to the proposed CEP research program on racialism. (shrink)

Singer and Regan predicate their arguments -- for ethical vegetarianism, against animal experimentation, and for an end to animal exploitation generally -- on the equal considerability premise (EC). According to (EC), we owe humans and sentient nonhumans exactly the same degree of moral considerability. While Singer's and Regan's conclusions follow from (EC), many philosophers reject their arguments because they find (EC)'s implications morally repugnant and intuitively unacceptable. Like most people, you probably reject (EC). Never the less, you're already committed to (...) the mere considerability premise -- the premise that sentient nonhuman animals deserve some moral consideration, although not as much consideration as that owed humans. I argue that the mere considerability premise entails that vegetarianism is morally obligatory in most contexts and that animal experimentation is almost always wrong. Since you accept the mere considerability premise, you are already rationally committed to the immorality of eating meat and the wrongfulness of most animal experimentation. Hence, moral consistency requires that you stop eating meat and stop purchasing products tested on animals. (shrink)

Banez’ commentary on I, q. 3, art. 3, is justly well-known for the criticism of earlier Thomists and for its metaphysical acuity. But Banez’ skill is best seen when we read not only his commentary, but the other texts which he himself was reading, such as the works of Capreolus, Soncinas, and Cajetan. In particular, he connects three issues which at first glance might seem unrelated, namely the view that esse is the ultimate act, that it is reduced to the (...) categories, and that it is less perfect than essence. The view that esse is the ultimate act implies that it can be reduced to the category of what is prior to it as the imperfect to the perfect. The position that essence on its own is prior and belongs to a category can lead to the view that essence is more perfect than esse. (shrink)

Thomas claims that a human act is specified both by the object and the end, and that the exterior act is the interior act’s object. These claims are best understood in light of the De Malo’s explicit mature teaching that the exterior act can be essentially good or bad, and that it is both the proximate end and the object of the interior act. Since the interior act wills the end, it wills the apprehended exterior act as the formality under (...) which the whole act is willed. The interior and exterior acts do not form the one human act merely as cause and effect, but also as matter and form. These clarifications explain some problematic texts in the Summa Theologiae. (shrink)

_Contributes a black Atlantic perspective to postmodernism, theology, and metaphysics._.

Latin American religious political thought includes colonial Spanish and Portuguese ideologies that preceded independence but have survived into the post-independence era, authoritarian ideologies supportive of military governments in the twentieth century, and progressive liberation theologies. In this article, I present a distinct tradition: a version of classical liberal thought. This tradition is skeptical of big government, opposed to caste systems, supportive of a high degree of federalism, uneasy with militarism, and supportive of democratic institutions while affirming religious social norms. This (...) ideology was developed in northeastern Brazil in the early nineteenth century by a Carmelite activist named Frei Caneca (Brother Mug), who published a newspaper titled the Typhis Pernambucano (Tiphys of the State of Pernambuco). (shrink)

What kind of persons could engage in political torture? Not only the morally impaired who lack empathy or compassion, or even the merely obedient, but also the righteous who struggle with conscience, and the realists who set morality aside.

Professors Battersby and Phelan have presented a lively challenge. They urge readers to reject the later, fuzzy Hirsch, in favor of an earlier, truer Hirsch.Their first objection is that Hirsch 2 has mistaken the nature of literary meaning. Battersby and Phelan reject the view that a literary work carries a general meaning analogous to the concept of “bicycle” that can be exemplified by all bicycles. They propose that a literary work is “more appropriately conceived as … a Schwinn or even (...) a red Schwinn three-speed with a blue seat and two flat tires”. They object to my adoption of Sir Philip Sidney’s claim that literature provides both the general concept and the particular example simultaneously. By saying that literature does both things at once I conflate and confuse, they say, two different intentions, because, as they aver, an exemplified concept cannot be further exemplified”.This claim reinstates the familiar New Critical doctrine that a literary concept is unique among concepts in that it can never be dissevered from its particular embodiment. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of numerous works including Validity in Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “Against Interpretation?” and “The Politics of Theories of Interpretation”. His most recent contributions is “Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted”. (shrink)

Among philosophers as well as linguists the battle is still joined between those who view the correlation between meaning and linguistic form as strictly determined by convention and those who argue for the essential indeterminacy of the relationship between meaning and form.1 Plato's Cratylus aside, the philosphical dialogue that forms the locus classicus of this debate is the following: "You're holding it upside down!" Alice interrupted. "To be sure I was!" Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for (...) him. "I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying. that seems to be done right - though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now - and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents -" "Certainly," said Alice. "And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!" "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."2 · 1. This should not be taken as an argument for the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning itself. Quite the contrary; it is because meaning can be stable and determinate despite variations in mental acts and linguistic forms that the relation between form and meaning must be indeterminate on the basis merely of rules and conventions.· 2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chap. 6. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Validity in Interpretation and Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. A second edition of his book on Blake, Innocence and Experience, will appear next year, as will a new book on critical theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the SubjectJames J. Brown Jr. and Joshua GunnActs of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Pp. x + 252. $24.95, hardcover.Thomas Rickert had a falling-out with his brother, and this distresses him so much that his disrupted relation is described as “traumatic.” Rickert reports that while listening (...) to a portable CD player during a run on an unexpectedly warm winter day, a song by the now defunct jazz/rock band Morphine reminded him of a happy time at a pool hall with his brother (24). Mediated—or better, medicated—by music, the homological happiness of running in the sun and a positive past memory also resurfaced a painful relational rupture, the reason of which Rickert omits to underscore that mysterious, “little detail or object” of the Real that marks his singular finitude as a writing subject (216 n. 11). We’ll want to come back to this curiously deliberate omission, but for the present we note Rickert is not simply an undead author but a human being with relations and feelings. He is not just a gifted scholar or a bundle of reflections, but a nexus of body and movement and words and affect. If there is anything that Rickert’s study can be said to work through with brilliance, humor, and grace, it is the reality of complex personhood.Rickert’s brotherly confession comes in Chapter 1 as a way to introduce a psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity, and more specifically, to help illustrate how trauma works itself out as an afterwardness or “belatedness” ( Nachträglichkeit ): traumatic events from the past are not reckoned with or worked-through until some coincidence or reminder, such as a similar [End Page 183] sensory experience, reintroduces the event in doubled re-presentation (18–27). This implies the “subject” (a paradigm person) is a kind of timedelay, a self-conscious temporal moving that becomes this way through re-presentation. The rhetorical subject is analogously a retrojected reckoning with events past (not all traumatic) that Rickert identifies as a scene of writing, a locus that has important implications for rhetorical studies in general and writing pedagogy in particular. Rickert’s logic is as follows: if we agree that the subject is a belated one in the psychoanalytic sense, then how we teach rhetoric needs to change. Rickert opens the book with the observation that his students are producing excellent cultural critiques but that such critiques do not lead the students to change their actions (1–7), perhaps evidence enough that something is not quite right in a classroom grounded by “cultural studies pedagogy” and ideology critique—or at the very least, proof that something has changed. The opening gambit is simply that a “postpedagogy” premised on an understanding of rhetorical subjectivity as belatedness is better than a status quo rooted in the rational subject of the Enlightenment.Mostly through a Žižek-filtered, Lacanian lens, Acts of Enjoyment then undertakes a retake of the rhetorical field, frequently scanning from the traumatic ontology of the rhetorical subject to that domain of knowledge that we hold dear, the subject of rhetoric. In Chapter 2, the (primal) scene thus shifts from the slo-mo subject to rhetorical studies, initially through a reassessment of Kinneavy’s “communications triangle,” but ultimately in response to the shock treatment of poststructuralism. The initial theoretical traumas introduced by Victor Vitanza, Diane Davis, Sharon Crowley, and others discussed in Chapter 1 are threaded into an account of “poststructural” redress in Chapter 2: as is true of all forms of trauma, the initial poststructural jolt delivered to the concept of subjectivity was deadened; poststructural theory was eventually used to “shore up rather than challenge Kinneavy’s triangle” (37). To truly work-through our traumatized subject in both senses, we need a second trauma: Lacanian psychoanalysis. Presumably, “poststructuralist thought” is to be opposed because it has no account of the subject (21–24); “Lacan,” after all, “is not a poststructuralist” (48). The remainder of the chapter is then used to deploy Lacan’s conceptual lexicon.Just as... (shrink)

Readers of the Analects of Confucius tend to approach the text asking what Confucius believed; what were the views that comprise the 'ism' appended to his name in English? A Reader's Companion to the Confucian Analects suggests a different approach: he basically taught his students not doctrines, but ways for each of them to find meaning and purpose in their lives, and how best to serve their society. Because his students were not alike, his instruction could not be uniform; hence (...) the large number of incompatible readings that have been given to what he said. By providing brief essays, finding lists, background and comparative materials, and historical context, this Companion is not intended as another interpretation of the ancient text, but rather as an aid for contemporary students to develop their own interpretive reading of it, in the hope of thereby aiding them in the search for meaning, purpose, and service in their own lives - as seventy-three generations of Chinese have done. (shrink)

Disease represents a principal tentacle of natural selection and a staple theme of evolutionary medicine. However, it is through a small portal of entry and a very long lineage that disease as sickness entered behavioural spaces and human consciousness. This has a long evolutionary history. Anyone interested in the origins of medicine and psychiatry as social institution has to start with analysis of how mind and body were conceptualised and played out behaviourally following the pongid/hominin split and thereafter. The early (...) evolution of medicine provides a template for clarifying elemental characteristics of mind and minding. Sickness and healing in chimpanzees represents an early manifestation of (ethno) medicine, termed a behavioural tradition, which is found played out in routines of helping, caring, and healing as well as other social behaviours. Chimpanzees seem to know they are sick since they resort to self-medication when exhibiting signs and symptoms of disease. Also, they help those exhibiting physical and cognitive disability. Among hominins, awareness of consequences and implications of sickness and coping with them represented an important feature of human consciousness and a major factor in the origins of vaunted human abilities involving language, cognition, and culture as we know them. A philosophical examination of the early evolution of sickness and healing provides a window into an understanding of evolving human capacities such as self-awareness, awareness and implications of suffering, theory of mind, altruism, conceptual grasp of sickness and healing and morality. (shrink)

Instead of benefitting from open meetings and public discussions, the Clintons drafted their health care plan in private and asked that it be accepted in haste. They advance an ideology that claims we can receive the best care for all without any increase in cost or rationing, and then they use "ethicists" to justify this ideology through a supposedly common morality. However, there is no such common morality. In the context of American pluralism, one must look to the actual consent (...) of the governed and recognize the limits on state authority. The result will be a two tiered system of health care, with a basic tier focusing on cost-effective care for the poor that eliminates suffering rather than equalizing inputs, and a space for collateral private insurance. Keywords: Clinton health plan, egalitarianism of envy, egalitarianism of altrusim, limited democracy, moral pluralism CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper, we offer two further issues or questions for consideration in thinking about orientation in or stance about technology. We do this in the light of the Zhuangzi’s Primitivist attitude towards technology. The Primitivist is one of the five authorial voices identified in the Zhuangzi. The Zhuangzi is a Chinese philosophical classic named after Zhuang Zhou or Zhuangzi (399?-295? B.C.E.). Fundamentally, we suggest that the Primitivist attitude of resistance towards technology might be said to highlight the point that (...) effects of technology to xing 性 (nature; human nature), thus to individual self, and the natural environment are important considerations in thinking about stance regarding technology. We hold that a reflection on technological orientation would on the whole benefit from a recognition and consideration of two more issues. (shrink)

The article attempts to settle a controversy between d f pears and j o urmson over the nature of russell's early theory of memory. it is shown that contrary to what pears claims in his "bertrand russell and the british tradition in philosophy," russell had explicitly abandoned a realist account of memory by 1915. the article sides with urmson as against pears, but apparently both have overlooked two of russell's little noticed 1915 papers in the "monist.".

Is Kantian Ethics guilty of utopian thinking? First, potentially good and bad uses of utopian ideals are distinguished, then an apparent path is traced from Rousseau’s unworkable political ideal to Kant’s ethical ideal. Three versions of Kant’s Categorical Imperative are examined briefly for the ways that they may raise the suspicion that they manifest or encourage bad utopian thinking. In each case Kantians have available responses to counter the suspicion, but special attention is directed to the version that says “Act (...) on the maxims of a universally law–giving member of a kingdom of ends.” Interpretations vary, but here primary focus is on one contemporary reconstruction and development of this central idea. Several objections suggest that this idea encourages bad utopian thinking are briefly addressed: that we cannot count on everyone to follow ideal rules, that even conscientious people disagree in their moral judgments, and that theories that allow exceptions to familiar moral rules create a “slippery slope” to moral chaos. (shrink)

Making consent work for its primary purposes has been, and will be, a challenge. Millum and Bromwich have done an excellent job of considering the manifold obligations of informed consent, with the...

This paper defends a coherentist approach to moral epistemology. In “The Immorality of Eating Meat”, I offer a coherentist consistency argument to show that our own beliefs rationally commit us to the immorality of eating meat. Elsewhere, I use our own beliefs as premises to argue that we have positive duties to assist the poor and to argue that biomedical animal experimentation is wrong. The present paper explores whether this consistency-based coherentist approach of grounding particular moral judgments on beliefs we (...) already hold, with no appeal to moral theory, is a legitimate way of doing practical ethics. I argue that grounding particular moral judgments on our core moral convictions and other core nonmoral beliefs is a legitimate way to justify moral judgments, that these moral judgments possess as much epistemic justification and have as much claim to objectivity as moral judgments grounded on particular ethical theories, and that this internalistic coherentist method of grounding moral judgments is more likely to result in behavioral guidance than traditional theory-based approaches to practical ethics. By way of illustrating the approach, I briefly recapitulate my consistency-based argument for ethical vegetarianism. I then defend the coherentist approach implicit in the argument against a number of potentially fatal metatheoretical attacks. (shrink)

The epistemological and sociological consequences of post-modernity include the inability to show moral strangers, in terms they can see as binding, the moral wrongness of activities such as abortion. Such activities can be perceived as morally disordered within a content-full moral narrative, but not outside of the context it brings. Though one can salvage something of the Enlightenment project of justifying a morality that can bind moral strangers, one is left with moral and metaphysical views that can be recognized as (...) impoverished and incomplete by those who live their lives within the embrace of a content-full moral narrative. The cardinal dualism of post-modemity is not that which separates mind from body, but the gulf between the morality binding moral strangers and that binding moral friends. Keywords: dualism, human embryo, personhood, post-modernity CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The question of the subject seems to occupy much of the current psychiatric/psychological landscape. Some theoreticians affirm that the subject or the self is an imaginary fiction, not a substantial entity in whose structure causes of psychological disorders and their respective antidotes are latent. “Subject,” they continue, “is what the vernacular speech says it is, that is, a self-reference marker that indexes human organisms’ sensory/motor singularity.” This marker, however, has nothing in common with a supposed metaphysical ethereal substrate, made up (...) of particles such as will, freedom, autonomy, ineffable consciousness, reason, emotions, desires, beliefs, judgments, aspirations, or interests. Taking such an... (shrink)

The disagreement over whether Aristotle recognized rights in some form unavoidably involves disagreement over what rights are, and the theory of rights itself is still highly contested. There is no consensus concerning how " right'? is to be defined, how rights are to be theoretically grounded, or how rights theory is to be applied in particular circumstances. This is not, however, a good reason to dismiss the issue of whether there are rights in Aristotle: for Aristotle, like modern rights theorists, (...) is concerned about the moral and legal status of the individual within the community, and he expresses this in terms of claims of justice. The issue is worthy of study not only because it can lead to a deeper understanding of Aristotle's conceptions of justice and the common good, but also because it may shed valuable light on the theoretical foundations of human rights, since he offers a theory of political justice which is based on a metaphysical theory of human nature. (shrink)