Lucius Annaeus Seneca The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca was a Stoic who adopted and argued largely from within the framework he inherited from his Stoic predecessors. His Letters to Lucilius have long been widely read Stoic texts. Seneca's texts have many aims: he writes to exhort readers to philosophy, to encourage … Continue reading Seneca, Lucius Annaeus →.
Historical convergence and personal relationships -- Critical reason with an emancipatory goal -- Anthropological differences among Tillich, Adorno, and Horkeimer -- Metaphysics and norms in critical social theory -- Religion and critical theory -- Appendix: Translation of Adorno's Entwurf contra Paulum.
This introductory philosophy text offers a clear, concise look at six major ideas of love: erotic love, Christian love, romantic love, moral love, love as power, and mutual love.
David Carr complains, in "Dennett Explained, or The Wheel Reinvents Dennett," (Report #26), that I have ignored deconstructionism and Phenomenology. This charge is in some regards correct and in others not. Briefly, here is how my own encounters with these fields have looked to me.
Democracy requires a rather large tolerance for confusion and a secret relish for dissent. I am delighted to respond to Daniel Dombrowski’s book Rawls and Religion. Dombrowski and I share a number of what he would call comprehensive doctrine, such as the ethical treatment of animals, the relational worldview of process thought, and the idiosyncratic love of pacifism. So, immediately I was drawn in and claimed Dombrowski as a kindred spirit. With so many commonalities, including an interest in political philosophy (...) and religion, I approached this book with a built-in desire to engage with and respect his thinking. To be honest, I wondered if I would be able to critically engage Dombrowski’s book given our .. (shrink)
Originally published by Routledge in 1988, this pioneering collection of essays now features a new preface and updated bibliography by the editor, reflecting the most significant developments in Plato scholarship during the past decade.
This paper addresses the problems that arise in relation to caregiving and those who are responsible for carrying it out, i.e. women. Although this is not a new problem, it did become evident after confinement was decreed following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. One question becomes evident and refers to why women should be the ones in charge of care and all that this implies, as if there were a biological and/or moral inclination that conditions them to play a (...) certain social role in both the public and private spheres. It follows that there are countless inequalities that place women in a place of great vulnerability with respect to men, which makes it necessary to incorporate a human rights approach in the analysis. For a better understanding of the aforementioned problem, we will briefly approach Carol Gilligan's theory of care, which also allows us to highlight the patriarchal logic that prevails in the background. (shrink)
Radical evil and the banality of evil are the two ways in which Arendt has cataloged totalitarian evil at different stages of his work. The aim of this paper is to approach the different Arendtian conceptions of evil from a political perspective in order to determine whether there are continuities or whether, on the contrary, there is an abrupt change in Arendt's thinking. The difficulty that must be faced is that the problem of evil and the political question are not (...) issues addressed by Arendt directly but are transversal contents that must be traced in the totality of his work. It is concluded that radical evil and the banality of evil are not mutually exclusive notions but rather function as expressions that refer to two different levels, one more general and structural and the other linked to the behavior of individuals within the government structures studied. (shrink)
Thomas E. Hill, Jr., interprets and extends Kant's moral theory in a series of essays that highlight its relevance to contemporary ethics. He introduces the major themes of Kantian ethics and explores its practical application to questions about revolution, prison reform, and forcible interventions in other countries for humanitarian purposes.
The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Yet metaphors may not only be special communicative devices, but a fundamental part of everyday cognition in the form of 'conceptual metaphors'. An enormous body of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics (...) and related disciplines has emerged detailing how conceptual metaphors underlie significant aspects of language, thought, cultural and expressive action. Despite its influence and popularity, there have been major criticisms of conceptual metaphor. This book offers an evaluation of the arguments and empirical evidence for and against conceptual metaphors, much of which scholars on both sides of the wars fail to properly acknowledge. (shrink)
In this paper, I identify two distinct positions on the nature of the body in Plato’s dialogues. One view, which I call the pessimistic view, holds that the body is evil and as such represents an obstacle to one’s epistemic and moral development. Another view, which I call the optimistic view, holds that the body is not itself either evil or good, but rather is capable of becoming either. The two views are, I argue, incompatible. Worse still, each view is (...) individually incompatible with other claims that Plato is eager to advance in some dialogues. The pessimistic view, I argue, is incompatible with the thesis that one who has knowledge will not err. The optimistic view is incompatible with the thesis that no one errs willingly. Here I consider a number of passages in Plato’s dialogues where the nature of the body is featured, but focus particularly on passages from the Timaeus and Laws, which explicitly endorse the pessimistic and optimistic views, respectively. Plato’s views of the body, I suggest, have far reaching implications for his views on the sources of moral error and the power of knowledge in guiding right action. (shrink)
The basing demand on doxastic justification is a widely held and highly intuitive dogma of contemporary epistemology. In Silva [2015, AJP], I argued that the dialectical significance of this dogma is severely limited by our lack of independent grounds for endorsing it. Oliveira [2015, AJP] sought to defend the basing demand on doxastic justification. Here I explain why Oliveira’s attempted defense of the basing demand misses its mark. I also briefly suggest that there is an alternative way of defending the (...) basing demand. The alternative way is reconciliatory: it shows that most epistemologists may have been right to insist on such a demand, but perhaps still wrong to treat it as a dialectically powerful tool in the assessment of certain substantive epistemological theories. (shrink)
This review engages Berger M, Reichardt T and Städtler M Der Geist geistloser Zustände: Religionskritik und Gesellschaftstheorie. The collection, along with each of the essays, is examined as a contribution to political and social critique of religion in light of secularization and pluralization.
The early theology of Karl Barth exhibits a seemingly incongruous emphasis on concepts like “origins” and “memory,” which would seem to suggest a point of contact between God and humanity. Although memory and anticipation are both ambiguous and tend towards self-reference, this article suggests that revelation is mediated through this ambiguity in Barth's theology through the early 1930s. Recollection can legitimately function as the basis of individual and ecclesial anticipation only when it is interpreted through the lens of the character (...) of God. Although this language largely disappears by the Church Dogmatics, this article argues that the early tension between memory and anticipation is gradually eclipsed but remains a crucially neglected foundation to Barth's later thought. (shrink)
Self-fulfilling beliefs are, in at least some cases, a kind of belief that is rational to form and hold in the absence of evidence. The rationality of such beliefs have significant implications for a range of debates in epistemology. Most startlingly, it undermines the idea that having sufficient evidence for the truth of p is necessary for it to be rational to believe p. The rationality of self-fulfilling beliefs is here defended against the idea that their rationality is incompatible with (...) a compelling closure principle. (shrink)
