In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] Crime, Compassion, and The Reader John E. MacKinnon IN "WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ," Günter Grass describes how at the age of seventeen he stubbornly refused to believe the evidence arrayed before him and his classmates of Nazi atrocities, the photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and bones. "Germans never could have done, never did do a thing (...) like that," he recalls thinking. And "when the Never collapsed," he and other young Germans were assured that they were free of responsibility. "It took several more years," Grass reports, "before I began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot be repressed or come to terms with." Later, he confesses that those of his age "belonged to the Auschwitz generation—not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals." 1Although one would be hard-pressed to find a novel more dramatically different in style and narrative development than Grass's own dark, audacious fables, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader 2 nonetheless shares this fascination with the notion of collective guilt, in particular the burden of inheritance endured by Germany's "second generation." Set in a university town in the late 1950s, the novel tells the story of a high school student, Michael Berg, who falls in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. Though capable of genuine concern and deep affection, Hanna is oddly secretive, often brusque and officious, occasionally given to cruelty and sarcasm, and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. She also has an endearing quirk: she likes Michael to read to her. Eventually, and without explanation, she vanishes from Michael's life. It is seven years before he sees her again, when, as a law student, he attends a trial of concentration-camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. She stands accused, along with four other [End Page 1] women, of serving at both Auschwitz and a satellite camp near Cracow, of being actively involved in the selection of prisoners for almost certain death, and of locking several hundred women in a church, where they burned to death during a bombing raid.In light of testimony given at trial, Hanna's puzzling conduct, and his own recollections of their time together, it finally dawns on Michael that Hanna cannot read, that she was and remains illiterate. But while in retrospect this may explain certain episodes of frustration, incomprehension, and overreaction on her part, does it have any bearing on her guilt? What would Michael himself have done if similarly situated, and similarly limited? Thus, the story of Michael and Hanna serves as an allegory of the relation between the two generations of Germans, those who were Nazis, or who at least assisted or accommodated them, and the "lucky late-born." It is against this background that Schlink is able most searchingly to investigate questions of complicity, recrimination, and atonement.As much courtroom drama as rite-of-passage tale, The Reader is also something of a philosophical investigation. According to Eva Hoffman, in fact, Schlink has managed to compose "a fictionalized essay... a kind of philosophical parable." For all the briskly evocative prose, she adds, The Reader "gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view." 3 In a recent article, Jeremiah P. Conway offers a sympathetic interpretation of the novel, attending in particular to the philosophical issues that it raises. Conway challenges Martha Nussbaum's claim that it is logically incoherent for us to feel compassion for one whom we hold responsible for a morally reprehensible act. 4 For in Hanna, he suggests, we have a compelling counterexample, a fit object of our compassion no less than our condemnation. And yet, Conway's challenge is grounded in an even more fundamental denial that The Reader is at all concerned to establish the circumstances of Hanna's life as mitigating her crime.In what follows, I will argue that this interpretation is untenable... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] Crime, Compassion, and The Reader John E. MacKinnon IN "WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ," Günter Grass describes how at the age of seventeen he stubbornly refused to believe the evidence arrayed before him and his classmates of Nazi atrocities, the photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and bones. "Germans never could have done, never did do a thing (...) like that," he recalls thinking. And "when the Never collapsed," he and other young Germans were assured that they were free of responsibility. "It took several more years," Grass reports, "before I began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot be repressed or come to terms with." Later, he confesses that those of his age "belonged to the Auschwitz generation—not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals." 1Although one would be hard-pressed to find a novel more dramatically different in style and narrative development than Grass's own dark, audacious fables, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader 2 nonetheless shares this fascination with the notion of collective guilt, in particular the burden of inheritance endured by Germany's "second generation." Set in a university town in the late 1950s, the novel tells the story of a high school student, Michael Berg, who falls in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. Though capable of genuine concern and deep affection, Hanna is oddly secretive, often brusque and officious, occasionally given to cruelty and sarcasm, and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. She also has an endearing quirk: she likes Michael to read to her. Eventually, and without explanation, she vanishes from Michael's life. It is seven years before he sees her again, when, as a law student, he attends a trial of concentration-camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. She stands accused, along with four other [End Page 1] women, of serving at both Auschwitz and a satellite camp near Cracow, of being actively involved in the selection of prisoners for almost certain death, and of locking several hundred women in a church, where they burned to death during a bombing raid.In light of testimony given at trial, Hanna's puzzling conduct, and his own recollections of their time together, it finally dawns on Michael that Hanna cannot read, that she was and remains illiterate. But while in retrospect this may explain certain episodes of frustration, incomprehension, and overreaction on her part, does it have any bearing on her guilt? What would Michael himself have done if similarly situated, and similarly limited? Thus, the story of Michael and Hanna serves as an allegory of the relation between the two generations of Germans, those who were Nazis, or who at least assisted or accommodated them, and the "lucky late-born." It is against this background that Schlink is able most searchingly to investigate questions of complicity, recrimination, and atonement.As much courtroom drama as rite-of-passage tale, The Reader is also something of a philosophical investigation. According to Eva Hoffman, in fact, Schlink has managed to compose "a fictionalized essay... a kind of philosophical parable." For all the briskly evocative prose, she adds, The Reader "gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view." 3 In a recent article, Jeremiah P. Conway offers a sympathetic interpretation of the novel, attending in particular to the philosophical issues that it raises. Conway challenges Martha Nussbaum's claim that it is logically incoherent for us to feel compassion for one whom we hold responsible for a morally reprehensible act. 4 For in Hanna, he suggests, we have a compelling counterexample, a fit object of our compassion no less than our condemnation. And yet, Conway's challenge is grounded in an even more fundamental denial that The Reader is at all concerned to establish the circumstances of Hanna's life as mitigating her crime.In what follows, I will argue that this interpretation is untenable... (shrink)

This book symposium on Jason Holt’s Kinetic Beauty: The Philosophical Aesthetics of Sport includes commentaries from Stephen Mumford, John E. MacKinnon and Andrew Edgar with replies from Holt.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Advocacy, Therapy, and PedagogyJohn E. MacKinnonBeyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University, edited by Stephen Richer and Lorna Weir; 272 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995, $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.Anyone who would doubt the relevance of philosophy to public affairs ought to attend to the unhappy evolution of the Canadian university. On campuses across the country in recent years, speech codes have been introduced, the “re-education” of professors (...) urged, visiting speakers on controversial subjects silenced, and classes monitored by administrators eager to do the bidding of various special interest groups. As universities have come more and more to see their role as that of some sort of multipurpose social project, education itself has become less pressing a priority. Thus, while money is found to hire sexual harassment officers, employment equity advisors and “wellness” mavens, academic posts disappear. Those that remain are frequently filled in accordance with crass gender and race-based quotas, and when that fails to guarantee positions for members of bureaucratically favored groups, contrived “schools” and pseudodisciplines proliferate. Many of these developments, however, are simply the manifestation of trickle-down deconstruction, trickle-down Rortyism, trickle-down “politics of difference,” of the sort that Charles Taylor is prone to rhapsodize. Notions of value, nature and merit, of equality, universality and objectivity are dismissed as mere inventions, “imperial” notions designed to favor the powerful and oppress the disenfranchised. The art [End Page 492] of spoken and written argument, with their ideals of detachment and discipline, are taken as evidence of a smug “androcentrism,” while rationality itself is derided as a “regime” that works “to maintain patriarchal control of knowledge and knowledge production.” Even the notion of evaluating students by means of essays and exams is ridiculed as scandalously “non-feminist.” While past attacks on academic independence have tended to come from outside the university, Canadian academics over the past decade have slavishly accepted their own domestication. More disconcerting still has been the role of pliant university presidents, most of whom have proved eager to unburden themselves of the inconvenience of scholarship and to indulge the cosmological musings of the radical left.Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University bristles both with resentment that such criticisms should even be aired and paranoia about their motivation. According to its contributors, the challenge to political correctness—the very use of the term as an epithet—is the result of a “neo-conservative” attack that has been orchestrated in and “imported” wholesale from the United States (to morally smug Canadians, there can be no more dastardly provenance) and insinuated into public debate by a servile media. The first two articles in the collection, by Dorothy Smith and Lorna Weir respectively, pursue this very theme. Each betrays that dreary habit, particularly prevalent among social scientists, of rendering imposingly technical the most bracingly trite. For instance, Smith writes: “The textuality of public text-mediated discourse is essential to its peculiar temporal and spatial properties of ubiquity and constancy of replication across multiple and various actual situations of watching, reading, or hearing” (p. 25). Translation? The more one sees, reads or hears a view expressed, the more one tends to believe it’s true. Her concern here, of course, is to establish that whoever controls the means of public debate controls its terms as well, that those means happen to be controlled by neo-conservative interests bent on retarding social progress, and that growing public disquiet about educational reform simply confirms the success of that neo-conservative strategy. But the failure of Smith’s account goes far beyond the thoroughly rebarbative nature of her expression.According to Smith, the very term, “political correctness,” is shorthand for an “ideological code” that has been expressly designed by “neo-conservatives” to caricature the good works of the visionary left. An ideological code, she says, operates as a “free-floating form of control,” which, once established, is “self-reproducing” (p. 27). Now, [End Page 493] the trouble with this picture is that it can account only for ascendant ideological codes, those that are successfully transmitted and progressively consolidated. And yet, in recent years, the ideological code of the left has to a considerable extent... (shrink)

"Quite otherwise than the scientist, and far more than the historian," writes R. G. Collingwood, "the philosopher must go to school with the poets in order to learn the use of language, and must use it in their way: as a means of exploring one's own mind, and bringing to light what is obscure and doubtful in it." Whereas the poet "yields himself to every suggestion that his language makes," however, the philosopher's words are assembled "only to reveal the thought (...) which they express, and are valuable not in themselves but as a means to that end." On this view, notes Collingwood, philosopher is to poet as lensgrinder is to jeweler: his art must conceal itself.1 And yet, the urge to emulate goes both ways, since... (shrink)

Although Philippe Ariès’s claims that death has been replaced by illness as our main obsession, I argue that illness is being replaced by wellness, an approach to living that encourages preemptive behavior. I review various critiques of “survivalism,” a view that both insists on our vulnerability and welcomes professional intervention in personal life. The resulting sense of anxiety, critics maintain, extends even to the “minutiae of human behavior,” including diet and fitness. I follow Jackson Lears in tracing these therapeutic commitments (...) to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and examine a novel set in that period: T. C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville, a satire about the perils of healthy living. I conclude by adapting Michael Sandel’s arguments against genetic enhancement to the issue of health. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 706-727, September 2021.

Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology addresses seven philosophically significant questions regarding feminism, its central concepts of sex and gender, and the project of centering women’s experience. Topics include the nature of sexist oppression, the sex/gender distinction, how gender-based norms influence conceptions of rationality, knowledge, and scientific objectivity, feminist ethics, feminst perspectives on self and autonomy, whether there exist distinct feminine moral perspectives, and what would comprise true liberation. Features an introductory overview illustrating the development of feminism as a philosophical movement (...) Contains both classic and contemporary sources of feminist thought, including selections by Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Simone de Beauvior, Kate Millett, bell hooks, Marilyn Frye, Martha Nussbaum, Louise Antony, Sally Haslanger, Helen Longino, Marilyn Friedman, Catharine MacKinnon, and Drucilla Cornell. (shrink)

Crime scene investigation is a form of Distributed Cognition. The principal concept we explore in this paper is that of `resource for action'. It is proposed that crime scene investigation employs four primary resources-for-action: the environment, or scene itself, which affords particular forms of search and object retrieval; the retrieved objects, which afford translation into evidence; the procedures that guide investigation, which both constrain the search activity and also provide opportunity for additional activity; the narratives that different agents within the (...) system produce to develop explanatory models and formal accounts of the crime. For each aspect of distributed cognition, we consider developments in technology that could support activity. (shrink)

Crime scene investigation is a form of Distributed Cognition. The principal concept we explore in this paper is that of `resource for action'. It is proposed that crime scene investigation employs four primary resources-for-action: the environment, or scene itself, which affords particular forms of search and object retrieval; the retrieved objects, which afford translation into evidence; the procedures that guide investigation, which both constrain the search activity and also provide opportunity for additional activity; the narratives that different agents within the (...) system produce to develop explanatory models and formal accounts of the crime. For each aspect of distributed cognition, we consider developments in technology that could support activity. (shrink)

The popular belief that religion is the same everywhere or that all religions are ‘at bottom’ identical in essentials is a widespread falsehood that is saved from being completely worthless by the fact that religion does exhibit a universal or common structure wherever it appears. This structure is intimately related to the structure of human life in the world. The enduring pattern that enables us to understand religions widely separated in both time and space depends largely on the fact that (...) man and the process of human life in the world have their own structures which remain, despite the undeniable variety introduced by vast differences of culture, ethnic features, geographical location, climate etc. Structure means pattern or form; it is reality significantly organised. It can be grasped as that which endures above and beyond changing historical details. Because human life has a structure, we are able to understand the wrath of Achilles or sympathise with the love of Abélard for Héloïse although we are separated from both by centuries of time. (shrink)

Despite the title, I do not intend to launch another expedition into the domain of epistemology. I wish instead to call attention to some problems which have arisen for philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion, as a result of two facts about the development of modern philosophy and its bearing on the analysis and interpretation of religious insight. Following these considerations, I shall propose in brief compass a programme for the future which I believe will prove fruitful for the philosophical (...) treatment of religious concerns. (shrink)

In the first comprehensive biography of Ferdinand de Saussure, John E. Joseph restores the full character and history of a man who is considered the founder of modern linguistics and whose ideas have influenced literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and virtually every other branch of humanities and the social sciences.

Establishes the importance of Husserl's phenomenology for Levinas's ethics.

Utilitarians, maximinners, prioritarians, and sufficientarians each provide examples of situations demonstrating, often apparently compellingly, that a sensible ethical observer must adopt their view and reject the others. I argue, to the contrary, that an attractive ethic is eclectic or pluralistic, in the sense of coinciding with these apparently different views in different regions of the space of social states. I reject the view that an appealing ethic can be universally maximin, prioritarian, or utilitarian.

People are habitual explanation generators. At its most mundane, our propensity to explain allows us to infer that we should not drink milk that smells sour; at the other extreme, it allows us to establish facts (e.g., theorems in mathematical logic) whose truth was not even known prior to the existence of the explanation (proof). What do the cognitive operations underlying the inference that the milk is sour have in common with the proof that, say, the square root of two (...) is irrational? Our ability to generate explanations bears striking similarities to our ability to make analogies. Both reflect a capacity to generate inferences and generalizations that go beyond the featural similarities between a novel problem and familiar problems in terms of which the novel problem may be understood. However, a notable difference between analogy-making and explanation-generation is that the former is a process in which a single source situation is used to reason about a single target, whereas the latter often requires the reasoner to integrate multiple sources of knowledge. This seemingly small difference poses a challenge to the task of marshaling our understanding of analogical reasoning to understanding explanation. We describe a model of explanation, derived from a model of analogy, adapted to permit systematic violations of this one-to-one mapping constraint. Simulation results demonstrate that the resulting model can generate explanations for novel explananda and that, like the explanations generated by human reasoners, these explanations vary in their coherence. (shrink)

As a work of a scholarship it seems to me to compare favourably with the best books on the subject, including those by Marcus Singer and Onora Nell.' Prof.

This book, first published in 1990, takes a critical look at the major assumptions which support critical thinking programs and discovers many unresolved questions which threaten their viability. John McPeck argues that some of these assumptions are incoherent or run counter to common sense, while others are unsupported by the available empirical evidence. This title will be of interest to students of the philosophy of education.

This review of Martin Jay’s recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth-construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of (...) paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth-telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process. (shrink)

_A new theory of how and why we cooperate, drawing from economics, political theory, and philosophy to challenge the conventional wisdom of game theory_ Game theory explains competitive behavior by working from the premise that people are self-interested. People don’t just compete, however; they also cooperate. John Roemer argues that attempts by orthodox game theorists to account for cooperation leave much to be desired. Unlike competing players, cooperating players take those actions that they would like others to take—which Roemer (...) calls “Kantian optimization.” Through rigorous reasoning and modeling, Roemer demonstrates a simpler theory of cooperative behavior than the standard model provides. (shrink)

Is morality too difficult for human beings? Kant said that it was, except with God's assistance. Contemporary moral philosophers have usually discussed the question without reference to Christian doctrine, and have either diminished the moral demand, exaggerated human moral capacity, or tried to find a substitute in nature for God's assistance. This book looks at these philosophers--from Kant and Kierkegaard to Swinburne, Russell, and R.M. Hare--and the alternative in Christianity.