This article addresses the problem of veracity in ancient historiography. It contests some recent views that the criteria of truth in historical writing were comparable to the standards of forensic rhetoric. Against this I contend that the historians of antiquity did follow their sources with commendable fi delity, superimposing a layer of comment but not adding independent material. To illustrate the point I examine the techniques of the Alexander historian, Q. Curtius Rufus, comparing his treatment of events with a range (...) of other sources that reflect the same tradition. The results can be paralleled in early modern historiography, in the dispute between J. G. Droysen and K. W. Krüger on the character of Callisthenes of Olynthus. Both operate with the same material, but give it different “spins” according to their political perspectives. There is error and hyperbole, but no deliberate fiction. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen a welcome erosion of traditional dogmas of Alexander scholarship, and a number of hallowed theories, raised on a cushion of metaphysical speculation above the mundane historical evidence, have succumbed to attacks based on rigorous logic and source analysis. The brotherhood of man as a vision of Alexander is dead, as is the idea that all Alexander sources can be divided into sheep and goats, the one based on extracts from the archives and the other (...) mere rhetorical fantasy. One notable theory, however, still flourishes and has indeed been described as one of the few certainties among Alexander's aims. This is the so-called policy of fusion. As so often, the idea and terminology go back to J. G. Droysen, who hailed Alexander's marriage to Rhoxane as a symbol of the fusion of Europe and Asia, which the king recognised as the consequence of his victory. At Susa the fusion of east and west was complete and Alexander, as interpreted by Droysen, saw in that fusion the guarantee of the strength and stability of his empire. Once enunciated, Droysen's formulation passed down the mainstream of German historiography, to Kaerst, Wilcken, Berve and Schachermeyr, and has penetrated to almost all arteries of Alexander scholarship. Like the figure of Alexander himself the theory is flexible and capable of strange metamorphoses. In the hands of Tarn it developed into the idea of all subjects, Greek and barbarian, living together in unity and concord in a universal empire of peace. The polar opposite is an essay of Helmut Berve, written in the heady days before the Second World War, in which he claimed that Alexander, with commendable respect for Aryan supremacy, planned a blending of the Macedonian and Persian peoples, so that the two racially related Herrenvölkerwould lord it over the rest of the world empire. On Berve's interpretation the policy had two stages. Alexander first recognised the merits of the Iranian peoples and placed them alongside the Macedonians in his court and army hierarchy. Next came the ‘Blutvermischung’, the integration of the two peoples by marriage. (shrink)

For all its celebrity, Thucydides' Funeral Speech remains an enigma. ‘Unquantifiably authentic’ is how one scholar describes it, and the description betrays a measure of despair. We feel that the speech is authentic in some sense of the word. To some degree it corresponds to what Pericles actually said in the winter of 431/30 BC, but the degree of correspondence is a mystery. All agree that Thucydides framed the speech in his own words and integrated it with his historical narrative, (...) so as to recall and answer Archidamus' encomium of Sparta in Book I. It also anticipates the forthcoming description of the plague with mordant, subtle allusions. (shrink)

The first Athenian intervention in Sicily is one of the most opaque episodes in Thucydides. The historian for once dispenses with a full record and confines himself explicitly to the major events of the campaign. What then emerges is a disconnected narrative of geographically separate actions, most of them trivial. There is no attempt to give a synoptic picture or explain the problems of strategy, and the lack of coordination has impressed many critics. The episode is remarkable for another reason. (...) For once we have that rarest of rare birds, an independent control source for Thucydides. Since 1930 there has been available a brief fragment of papyrus, usually ascribed to Philistus, which provides an extraordinarily detailed, if fragmentary, report of a portion of the campaign. The fragment has become a standard reference, and it is reported, not always accurately, in the more recent scholarship on the Peloponnesian War. But there has been little attempt to come to terms with the historiographical problem it poses. Not only does the fragment give a large amount of detail which has no counterpart in Thucydides, but its narrative, as it is usually interpreted, is formally inconsistent with Thucydides' chronology. The new fragment is most probably the work of a Sicilian historian, well acquainted with the events of 427/6, and it is – to put it mildly – disturbing to find a contradiction in what should have been an easily verifiable sequence of events. (shrink)

The figure of Alexander inevitably dominates the history of his reign. Our extant sources are centrally focussed upon the king himself. Accordingly it is his own military actions which receive the fullest documentation. Appointments to satrapies and satrapal armies are carefully noted because he made them, but the achievements of the appointees are passed over in silence. The great victories of Antigonus which secured Asia Minor in 323 BC are only known from two casual references in Curtius Rufus, and in (...) general all the multifarious activities in the empire disappear from recorded history except in so far as they impinge upon court life in the shape of reports to Alexander and administrative decisions made by him. Moreover, the sources we possess originate either from high officers of Alexander's court, such as Ptolemy and Nearchus, or from Greek historians like Callisthenes and Cleitarchus, whose aims were literary or propagandist and whose interests were firmly anchored in court life. Inevitably Alexander bestrides that narrow world like a colossus and monopolises the historical picture. But even the figure of Alexander is far from fully fleshed. No contemporary history survives, and for continuous narratives of the reign we are dependent upon late derivative writers who saw Alexander through the filter of centuries of rhetoric and philosophy. The king had long been a stock example of many contradictory traits; he was at once the conqueror and the civiliser, the tyrant and the enlightened king. Cicero and Seneca saw him as the type of unbridled license, Arrian as the paradigm of moderation. The result is that the sources present a series of irreconcilable caricatures of Alexander but no uniform or coherent picture. (shrink)

For many years essentialism was considered beyond the pale in philosophy, a relic of discredited Aristotelianism. This is no longer so. Kripke and Putnam have made belief in essential natures respectable once more. Harré and Madden have argued against Hume's theory of causation and developed an alternative theory based on the assumption that there are genuine causal powers in nature. Dretske, Tooley, Armstrong, Swoyer, and Carroll have all developed strong alternatives to Hume's theory of the laws of nature. And Shoemaker (...) has developed a thoroughly non-Humean theory of properties. The "new essentialism" has evolved from these beginnings and can now reasonably claim to be a metaphysic for a modern scientific understanding of the world - one that challenges the conception of the world as comprising passive entities whose interactions are to be explained by appeal to contingent laws of nature externally imposed. (shrink)

The enhancement debate in neuroscience and biomedical ethics tends to focus on the augmentation of certain capacities or functions: memory, learning, attention, and the like. Typically, the point of contention is whether these augmentative enhancements should be considered permissible for individuals with no particular “medical” disadvantage along any of the dimensions of interest. Less frequently addressed in the literature, however, is the fact that sometimes the _diminishment_ of a capacity or function, under the right set of circumstances, could plausibly contribute (...) to an individual's overall well-being: more is not always better, and sometimes less is more. Such cases may be especially likely, we suggest, when trade-offs in our modern environment have shifted since the environment of evolutionary adaptation. In this article, we introduce the notion of “diminishment as enhancement” and go on to defend a _welfarist_ conception of enhancement. We show how this conception resolves a number of definitional ambiguities in the enhancement literature, and we suggest that it can provide a useful framework for thinking about the use of emerging neurotechnologies to promote human flourishing. (shrink)

In _What Animals Teach Us about Politics_, Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, (...) sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion." Massumi finds the conceptual resources for this logic in the work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, the theory of play, and the thought of Alfred North Whitehead. (shrink)

After first noting that I seek to broaden the definition of science fiction to a little more loosely defined speculative fiction, this essay explores four different ways in which fiction can work together with both the sciences and the philosophy of perception. This cooperation is needed because there is much about the sensory worlds of humans and non-human animals of which we continue to be ignorant. First, speculative fiction can be a source of hypotheses about the nature of the senses. (...) Second, it can help us understand the inner worlds of beings different from us. Third, speculative fiction often pushes us to investigate the ethical and social dimensions of sensory difference. Finally, speculative fiction can play an important role in reconciling our scientific understanding of the senses with a more commonsense understanding of same. (shrink)

Color coded terror alerts, invasion, drone war, rampant surveillance: all manifestations of the type of new power Brian Massumi theorizes in _Ontopower_. Through an in-depth examination of the War on Terror and the culture of crisis, Massumi identifies the emergence of preemption, which he characterizes as the operative logic of our time. Security threats, regardless of the existence of credible intelligence, are now felt into reality. Whereas nations once waited for a clear and present danger to emerge before using (...) force, a threat's felt reality now demands launching a preemptive strike. Power refocuses on what _may_ emerge, as that potential presents itself to feeling. This affective logic of potential washes back from the war front to become the dominant mode of power on the home front as well. This is ontopower—the mode of power embodying the logic of preemption across the full spectrum of force, from the “hard” to the "soft". With _Ontopower_, Massumi provides an original theory of power that explains not only current practices of war but the culture of insecurity permeating our contemporary neoliberal condition. (shrink)

This is the first book to explore the cognitive science of effortless attention and action. Attention and action are generally understood to require effort, and the expectation is that under normal circumstances effort increases to meet rising demand. Sometimes, however, attention and action seem to flow effortlessly despite high demand. Effortless attention and action have been documented across a range of normal activities--from rock climbing to chess playing--and yet fundamental questions about the cognitive science of effortlessness have gone largely unasked. (...) -/- This book draws from the disciplines of cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, behavioral psychology, genetics, philosophy, and cross-cultural studies. Starting from the premise that the phenomena of effortless attention and action provide an opportunity to test current models of attention and action, leading researchers from around the world examine topics including effort as a cognitive resource, the role of effort in decision making, the neurophysiology of effortless attention and action, the role of automaticity in effortless action, expert performance in effortless action, and the neurophysiology and benefits of attentional training. -/- Contributors: Joshua M. Ackerman, James H. Austin, John A. Bargh, Roy F. Baumeister, Sian L. Beilock, Chris Blais, Matthew M. Botvinick, Brian Bruya, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Marci S. DeCaro, Arne Dietrich, Yuri Dormashev, László Harmat, Bernhard Hommel, Rebecca Lewthwaite, Örjan de Manzano, Joseph T. McGuire, Brian P. Meier, Arlen C. Moller, Jeanne Nakamura, Evgeny N. Osin, Michael I. Posner, Mary K. Rothbart, M. R. Rueda, Brandon J. Schmeichel, Edward Slingerland, Oliver Stoll, Yiyuan Tang, Töres Theorell, Fredrik Ullén, Robert D. Wall, Gabriele Wulf. (shrink)

A common view relating compositional semantics and the objects of assertion holds the following: Sentences φ and ψ expresses the same proposition iff φ and ψ have the same modal profile. Following Dummett, Evans, and Lewis, Stanley argues that this view is fundamentally mistaken. According to Dummett, we must distinguish the semantic contribution a sentence makes to more complex expressions in which it occurs from its assertoric content. Stojnić insists that views which distinguish the roles of content and semantic value (...) must nevertheless ensure a tight connection between the two. But, she contends, there is a crucial disanalogy between the views that follow Lewis and the views that follow Dummett. Stanley’s Dummettian view is argued to contain a fatal flaw: On such views, there is no way to secure an appropriate connection between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. I will review the background issues from Dummett, Evans, Lewis, and Stanley, and provide a principled way of bridging the gap between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. (shrink)

Among politicians and policy-makers it is almost universally assumed that more transparency in government is better. Until now, philosophers have almost completely ignored the topic of transparency, and when it is discussed there seems to be an assumption that increased transparency is a good thing, which results in no serious attempt to justify it. In this book Brian Kogelmann shows that the standard narrative is false and that many arguments in defence of transparency are weak. He offers a comprehensive (...) philosophical analysis of transparency in government, examining both abstract normative defences of transparency, and transparency's role in the theory of institutional design. His book shows that even when the arguments in favour of transparency are compelling, the costs associated with it are just as forceful as the original arguments themselves, and that strong arguments can be made in defence of more opaque institutions. (shrink)

Recent works have suggested an analytical complementarity in mixing big and thick data sources. These works have, however, remained as programmatic suggestions, leaving us with limited methodological inputs on how to archive such complementary integration. This article responds to this limitation by proposing a method for ‘blending’ big and thick analytical insights. The paper first develops a methodological framework based on the cognitivist linguistics terminology of ‘blending’. Two cases are then explored in which blended spaces are crafted from engaging big (...) and thick analytical insights with each other. Through these examples, we learn how blending processes should be conducted as a rapid, iterative and collaborative effort with respect for individual expertise. Further, we demonstrate how the unique, but often overlooked, granularity of big data plays a key role in affording the blending with thick data. We conclude by suggesting four commonly appearing blending strategies that can be applied when relying upon big and thick data sources. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Alan Thomas presents a novel defence of what I call ‘Rawlsian Institutionalism about Justice’ against G. A. Cohen’s well-known critique. In this response I aim to defend Cohen’s rejection of Institutionalism against Thomas’s arguments. In part this defence requires clarifying precisely what is at issue between Institutionalists and their opponents. My primary focus, however, is on Thomas’s critical discussion of Cohen’s endorsement of an ethical prerogative, as well as his appeal to the institutional (...) framework of a ‘property-owning democracy’ in his elaboration of the precise institutional requirements of Rawlsian Institutionalist justice, and his related claim that Cohen’s rejection of Institutionalism involves an objectionable ‘double counting’ of the demands of justice. I argue that once we are clear about both the kind of justification that can be given for a prerogative within a plausible ethical theory, and about the key points of departure between Institutionalist views and their rivals, Cohen’s rejection of Institutionalism appears well-motivated, and Thomas’s claim that his view is guilty of double counting the demands of justice can be seen to be mistaken. (shrink)

Over the past few years, we and our colleagues have been exploring the ethical implications of what we call “love drugs” and “anti-love drugs.” We use these terms informally to refer to “current, near-future, and more speculative distant-future technologies that would enhance or diminish, respectively, the romantic bond between couples engaged in a relationship”. In a recent “qualified defense” of our work, Andrew Andrew McGee suggests that, if we would only stop using the word “love” so expansively, our ethical proposals (...) might gain more traction. Specifically, he argues that “many of the putative instances of love” that we discuss in our papers “are not in fact... (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that the non-therapeutic, non-consensual alteration of children‘s genitals should be discussed in two separate ethical discourses: one for girls (in which such alterations should be termed 'female genital mutilation' or FGM), and one for boys (in which such alterations should be termed 'male circumcision‘). In this article, I call into question the moral and empirical basis for such a distinction, and argue that all children - whether female, male, or indeed intersex - should be free from (...) having parts of their genitals removed unless there is a pressing medical indication. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is a difficulty for Fine's exact semantics for counterfactuals. The difficulty undermines Fine's reasons for preferring exact semantics to possible worlds semantics.

In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Dietz argues that what I have called the ‘institutional critique of effective altruism’ is best understood as grounded in the claim that ‘EA relies on an overly individualistic approach to ethics, neglecting the importance of our collective obligations’. In this reply, I argue that Dietz’s view does not represent a plausible interpretation of the institutional critiques offered by others, primarily because, unlike Dietz, they appear to believe that their critiques provide reasons to (...) reject the EA view about the content of our individual obligations. I also argue that EA’s identity as a social movement provides grounds for denying Dietz’s claim that it is objectionably incomplete. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett (1996) has disputed David Chalmers' (1995) assertion that there is a "hard problem of consciousness" worth solving in the philosophy of mind. In this paper I defend Chalmers against Dennett on this point: I argue that there is a hard problem of consciousness, that it is distinct in kind from the so-called easy problems, and that it is vital for the sake of honest and productive research in the cognitive sciences to be clear about the difference. But I (...) have my own rebuke for Chalmers on the point of explanation. Chalmers (1995, 1996) proposes to "solve" the hard problem of consciousness by positing qualia as fundamental features of the universe, alongside such ontological basics as mass and space-time. But this is an inadequate solution: to posit, I will urge, is not to explain. To bolster this view, I borrow from an account of explanation by which it must provide "epistemic satisfaction" to be considered successful (Rowlands, 2001; Campbell, 2009), and show that Chalmers' proposal fails on this account. I conclude that research in the science of consciousness cannot move forward without greater conceptual clarity in the field. (shrink)

Pragmatic encroachment theories have a problem with evidence. On the one hand, the arguments that knowledge is interest-relative look like they will generalise to show that evidence too is interest-relative. On the other hand, our best story of how interests affect knowledge presupposes an interest-invariant notion of evidence. -/- The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of evidence that is interest-relative, but which allows that ‘best story’ to go through with minimal changes. The core idea is that (...) the evidence someone has is just what evidence a radical interpreter says they have. And a radical interpreter is playing a kind of game with the person they are interpreting. The cases that pose problems for pragmatic encroachment theorists generate fascinating games between the interpreter and the interpretee. They are games with multiple equilibria. To resolve them we need to detour into the theory of equilibrium selection. I’ll argue that the theory we need is the theory of risk-dominant equilibria. That theory will tell us how the interpreter will play the game, which in turn will tell us what evidence the person has. The evidence will be interest-relative, because what the equilibrium of the game is will be interest-relative. But it will not undermine the story we tell about how interests usually affect knowledge. (shrink)

Rational self-interest is often seen as being at the heart of liberal economic theory. In _The Power at the End of the Economy_ Brian Massumi provides an alternative explanation, arguing that neoliberalism is grounded in complex interactions between the rational and the emotional. Offering a new theory of political economy that refuses the liberal prioritization of individual choice, Massumi emphasizes the means through which an individual’s affective tendencies resonate with those of others on infra-individual and transindividual levels. This nonconscious (...) dimension of social and political events plays out in ways that defy the traditional equation between affect and the irrational. Massumi uses the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement as examples to show how transformative action that exceeds self-interest takes place. Drawing from David Hume, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Niklas Luhmann and the field of nonconsciousness studies, Massumi urges a rethinking of the relationship between rational choice and affect, arguing for a reassessment of the role of sympathy in political and economic affairs. (shrink)

The phenomenon of action in which the mind moves the body has puzzled philosophers over the centuries. In this new edition of a classic work of analytical philosophy, Brian O'Shaughnessy investigates bodily action and attempts to resolve some of the main problems. His expanded and updated discussion examines the scope of the will and the conditions in which it makes contact with the body, and investigates the epistemology of the body. He sheds light upon the strangely intimate relation of (...) awareness in which we stand to our own bodies, doing so partly through appeal to the concept of the body-image. The result is a new and strengthened emphasis on the vitally important function of the bodily will as a transparently intelligible bridge between mind and body, and the proposal of a dual aspect theory of the will. (shrink)

[Brian P. McLaughlin] In recent years, some philosophers have claimed that we can know a priori that certain external world skeptical hypotheses are false on the basis of a priori knowledge that we are in certain kinds of mental states, and a priori knowledge that those mental states are individuated by contingent environmental factors. Appealing to a distinction between weak and strong a priority, I argue that weakly a priori arguments of this sort would beg the question of whether (...) the skeptical hypothesis under assessment is true, and that the prospect of a sound strongly a priori argument of this sort seems dim. \\\ [David Owens] Contemporary discussion of scepticism focuses on the possibility that most or all of our beliefs might be false. I argue that the hypothesis of massive falsity and the associated 'problem of the external world' are inessential to the scepticisms of Descartes and Hume. What drives Cartesian and Humean scepticism is the demand for certainty: any possibility of error, however local, must be ruled out before we can claim either justified belief or knowledge. Contemporary philosophers have ignored this form of scepticism because they doubt that the demand for certainty can be motivated. But Descartes provides a sound motivation for this demand in the Meditations. (shrink)

This study employs a qualitative approach to investigate the factors influencing engagement in Irish employee wellbeing programmes. Two stages of data collection were conducted, involving 52 employees completing open-ended questionnaires in Stage 1 and 23 participants interviewed in Stage 2. Three themes emerged from the thematic analysis of the data: (1) communicating wellbeing initiatives; (2) creating and maintaining interest in wellbeing; and (3) challenges to employee wellbeing. The three themes and their subthemes provide qualitative evidence from employees on the barriers (...) to and drivers of workplace wellbeing initiative utilisation through the lenses of Resource utilisation Theory and Culture of Health. The findings underscore the importance of supportive environments and effective design in enhancing programme utilisation, along with the need to offer targeted initiatives addressing secondary and tertiary wellbeing issues. By addressing shortcomings in Irish workplaces, this research contributes to advancing the effectiveness and impact of workplace wellbeing initiatives at multiple levels: organisational, individual, and governmental. (shrink)

This essay raises a challenge for the perceptual theory of emotion. According to the perceptual theory, emotions are perceptual states that represent values. But if emotions represent values, something should explain why. In virtue of what do emotions represent the values they do? A psychosemantics would answer this, and that’s what the perceptual theorist owes us. To date, however, the only perceptual theorist to attempt a psychosemantics for emotion is Jesse Prinz. And Prinz’s theory, I argue, faces an important difficulty: (...) It makes the pairing of any given emotion with its respective value entirely arbitrary. But that’s a problem. It seems—and this is a major contention of this essay—that an emotion, in virtue of how it feels, bears a natural or non-arbitrary link to the value it represents. And this datum makes it all the more difficult to provide a viable psychosemantics for the evaluative content of emotion. (shrink)

Face-to-face interaction is a primordial site for human activity and intersubjectivity. Empirical studies have shown how people reflexively exhibit a face orientation and work to establish a formation in which everyone is facing each other in local participation frameworks. The Face has also been described by, e.g., Levinas as the basis for a first ethical philosophy. Humans have established these Face-formations when interacting since time immemorial, but what happens when one of the participants is present through a telepresence robot? Based (...) on ethnomethodology, Peircean/goodwinian semiotics, multimodal conversation analysis and video data from a Danish residential rehabilitation center, the article shows the ways in which participants manage to interactively, cooperatively, and moment by moment achieve an F-formation in situ. The article contributes a detailed analysis and discussion of the kind of participant a telepresence robot is, in and through situated interactions: I propose that we term this participant the RoboDoc, given that it is an assemblage of a doctor who controls a robot. By focusing on the affordances of mobility, the article contributes to a renewed understanding of the importance and relevance of establishing Face-orientations in an increasingly technofied telepresence world. (shrink)

This book explains and defends a naturalized reading of Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power. By providing a new interpretation of the term, Brian Lightbody argues that other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as his ontology, epistemology and ethics become clearer and more coherent.

In a recent paper (in Argumentation, 2006) Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin suggest that we ought to recognize two distinct forms of the straw man fallacy. In addition to misrepresenting the strength of an opponent’s specific argument (= the representation form), one can also misrepresent the strength of one’s opposition in general, or the overall state of a debate, by selecting a (relatively) weak opponent for critical consideration (= the selection form). Here I consider whether we as philosophy professors could (...) be seen as sometimes committing the selection form of the straw man through the performance of our regular teaching duties. (shrink)

Many contemporary explanations of conscious human experience, relying either upon neuroscience or appealing to a spiritual soul, fail to provide a complete and coherent theory. These explanations, the author argues, fall short because the underlying explanatory constituent for all experience are not entities, such as the brain or a spiritual soul, but rather relation and the unique way in which human beings form relations. This alternative frontier is developed through examining the phenomenological method of Martin Heidegger and the semiotic theory (...) of Charles S. Peirce. While both of these thinkers independently provide great insight into the difficulty of accounting for human experience, this volume brings these insights into a new complementary synthesis. This synthesis opens new doors for understanding all aspects of conscious human experience, not just those that can be quantified, and without appealing to a mysterious spiritual principle. (shrink)

This study brings together a number of related critical issues, including the causal laws that attempt to govern fictional worlds, the reader's implication in the causal dilemmas that confront major characters, and the philosophical and ideological ascriptions of cause that are variously embodied, interrogated, or parodied. One of the most significant features of this study is its disclosure of just how fundamental and widespread causal issues are in complex narratives - and how insistently they are thematized in twentieth-century works.

For more than a generation, historical interpretations of emancipation in the United States have acknowledged that the slaves played a central role in driving that process forward. This is a critically important advance, and one worth defending. But it is also a perspective whose influence seems increasingly precarious. This article explores the complex relationship between the slaves’ ‘revolution from below’ and the bourgeois revolution directed from above, in part through an appraisal of W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument about the ‘slaves’ general (...) strike’ and the wider revolutionary upheaval encompassing civil war and reconstruction. Grounded in a close familiarity with sources and interpretive trends, the article offers a detailed reading of shifting perspectives in current historiography, a comprehensive review of left engagement with Du Bois’s work, and an extended ‘critical and sympathetic’ appraisal of his major work from within the framework of the Marxist tradition. (shrink)

Human beings are peculiar. In laboratory experiments, they often cooperate in one-shot prisoners’ dilemmas, they frequently offer 1/2 and reject low offers in the ultimatum game, and they often bid 1/2 in the game of divide-the-cake All these behaviors are puzzling from the point of view of game theory. The first two are irrational, if utility is measured in a certain way.1 The last isn’t positively irrational, but it is no more rational than other possible actions, since there are infinitely (...) many other Nash equilibria besides the one in which both players bid 1/2. At the same time, these behaviors seem to indicate that people are sometimes inclined to be cooperative, fair, and just. In his stimulating new book, Brian Skyrms sets himself the task of showing why these inclinations evolved, or how they might have evolved, under the pressure of natural selection. The goal is not to justify our ethical intuitions, but to explain why we have them.2.. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

We argue that the fragility of contemporary marriages—and the corresponding high rates of divorce—can be explained (in large part) by a three-part mismatch: between our relationship values, our evolved psychobiological natures, and our modern social, physical, and technological environment. “Love drugs” could help address this mismatch by boosting our psychobiologies while keeping our values and our environment intact. While individual couples should be free to use pharmacological interventions to sustain and improve their romantic connection, we suggest that they may have (...) an obligation to do so as well, in certain cases. Specifically, we argue that couples with offspring may have a special responsibility to enhance their relationships for the sake of their children. We outline an evolutionarily informed research program for identifying promising biomedical enhancements of love and commitment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RELIGIOUS FREEDOM: HOMOGENEOUS OR HETEROGENEOUS DEVELOPMENT? BRIAN T. MULLADY, 0.P. Holy Apostles College and Seminary Cromwell, Connecticut 0 NE OF THE most difficult questions to confront those who hold for a natural-law conception of Catholic moral teaching which does not change with the development of the times is the area of the freedom of religion in the political order. The traditional teaching on this subject is expressed in (...) many places. The most difficult locus for anyone who wants to defend the traditional opinion is found in The Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX. In this document, the following canons are explicitly enumerated : 77. In this age of ours it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other cults whatsoever. 78. Hence in certain regions of Catholic name, it has been laudably sanctioned by law that men immigrating there be allowed to have public exercises of any form of worship of their own. 79. For it is false that the civil liberty of every cult, and likewise, the full power granted to all of manifesting openly and publicly any kind of opinions and ideas, more easily leads to the corruption of the morals and minds of the people, and to the spread of the evil of indifferentism.1 1 " 77. Aestate hac nostra non amplius expedit, religionem catholicam haberi tamquam unicam status religionem, ceteris quibuscumque cultibus exclusus. 78. Hine laudabiliter in quibusdam catholici nominis regionibus lege cautum est, ut hominibus illuc immigrantibus liceat publicum proprii cuiusque cultus exercitium habere. 79. Enimvero falsum est, civilem cuiusque cultus libertatem, itemque plenam potestatem omnibus attributam quaslibet opiniones cogitationesque palam publiceque manifestandi conducere ad populorum mores animosque facilius corrumpendos ac indifferentismi pestem propagandam." Denizinger -Schonmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, n. 1777-1779 (2977-2979), hereafter refered to as DS. 93 94 BRIAN T. MULLADY, O.P. In this text, freedom of religion is clearly condemned. Yet one finds about one hundred years later the issue of religious freedom discussed by Vatican II. Here the conclusion reached seems quite different. The Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. Freedom of this kind means that all men should be immune from coercion on the part of individuals, social groups and every human power so that, within due limits, nobody is forced to act against his convictions in religious matters in private or in public, alone or in associations with others. The Council further declares that the right to religious freedom is based on the very dignity of the human person as known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself. This right of the human person to religious freedom must be given such recognition in the constitutional order of society as will make it a civil right.2 These two documents seem to represent a significant change in the teaching of the church. Beyond the obvious change in attitude towards religious freedom, many moral theologians also see another change : the very language of the decree signals a departure from the traditional basis of the law of nature by a reference to the dignity of the human person. One example will suffice: It may also be a growing dissatisfaction with the traditional concept of ' nature ' which has contributed in recent years to the focus of moral attention moving from ' human nature ' to ' human person ' 2 " Haec Vaticana Synodus declarat personam humanam ius habere ad libertatem religiosam. Huiusmodi libertas in eo consistit, quod omnes homines debent immunes esse a coercitione ex parte sive singulorum sive coetuum socialium et cuiusvis potestatis humanae, et ita quidem ut in re religiosa neque aliquis cogatur ad agendum contra suam conscientiam neque impediatur, quominus iuxta suam conscientiam agat privatim et publice, vel solus vel aliis consociatus, intra debitos limites. Insuper declarat ius ad libertatem religiosam esse revera fundatum in ipsa dignitate personae humanae, qualis et verbo Dei revelato et ipsa ratione congnoscitur. Hoc ius personae humanae ad libertatem religiosam in iuridica societatis ordinatione ita est agnoscendum, ut ius civile evadat." Vatican II, Declaratio de Libertate Religiosa: Dignitatis Humanae, n. 2. Translations are taken from Vatican Council II, The Conciliar and Post Conciliar... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 29.1 (2005) 1-23 [Access article in PDF] Literature and Evolution: A Bio-Cultural Approach Brian Boyd University of Auckland Many now feel that the "theory" that has dominated academic literary studies over the last thirty years or so is dead, and that it is time for a return to texts.1 But many more outside literary studies—in fields as diverse as anthropology, economics, law, psychology, and religion—have (...) recently come to recognize that the deep past that shaped our species can help to explain our present and recent past. Since a bio-cultural model of the human can only be richer than a solely cultural model, and since it implies neither genetic determinism nor limitation to the status quo, I want to argue for a bio-cultural or evolutionary approach to literature, first in very general terms, and then through a few aspects of a single familiar example, Hamlet.2 Such an approach, I suggest, can offer both a more comprehensive theory of literature and a closer investigation of literary texts. I Traditional views of literature tended to see it as reflecting nature, especially human nature, all the way from Plato's discomfort with, or Aristotle's admiration for, mimesis to Shakespeare's or Stendhal's images of art as holding the mirror up to nature. Common-sense traditional views of art and literature have easily shaded into transcendental views, widespread because religious beliefs have been so pervasive and because both artists and their patrons in state or church benefit by nurturing a sense of awe at art's putatively divine origins and power.In the twentieth century, first in sociology, anthropology, and even [End Page 1] psychology, then by the 1960s in the combination of these with Saussurean linguistics that produced structuralism and its aftershocks, and therefore impacted on literature, there has been a rejection of human nature as a given and a stress on human nature as the product only of culture and convention. "Theory," or what the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism more pointedly calls cultural critique, rightly critiques traditional common-sense and transcendental views of art, pointing out that the nature, human nature, or supernature that art or literature was supposed to reflect was merely what was assumed of these things from within a local cultural perspective.3 Roland Barthes, for example, criticized "the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature."4 Modern Theory also rejects the individual as another bourgeois or capitalist or Western notion, as when Fredric Jameson echoed Barthes's Death of the Author by announcing the Death of the Subject.5 Criticism since the 1960s "has denied, on theoretical grounds, the relevance of the single historically definable author."6However, as many have lately realized, there are problematic ethical consequences of both the denial of human nature and the denial of the individual. After such denials, on what basis do we then claim equal rights for all humans, and on what basis do we assign responsibility for particular actions?7 If there is no "single historically definable author," does that mean that someone penning a racist screed cannot be held accountable?A critique of unquestioned Western assumptions about human nature was needed, but the post-1960s critique was shortsighted: it has not looked nearly far enough. While structuralism and its more or less rebellious offspring were continuing the lineage of early twentieth-century social sciences, the natural sciences were moving in the opposite direction, towards the first comprehensive scientific attempt to understand human nature in the context of evolution and human, animal, and artificial cognition and behavior.In the humanities there has of late been widespread skepticism about science. Some postmodernists have what they deem "a sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge claims." But, as Daniel Dennett comments, "this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naïveté, made possible only by... ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power."8 Science does not generate only true answers: ideas proposed within it can of... (shrink)

While there is an absence of treatises devoted to the question of ens ut primum cognitum, there is no shortage of brief and implicit treatments; indeed, nearly every Thomist of the past seven centuries seems to have at least something to say about the notion that being is the first of our intellectual conceptions. Most recent Thomist thinkers—including Gilson—assume this ens to be nothing other than the ens reale of things entitatively considered, operating as they do out of a framework (...) within which realism and idealism are presumed to be exhaustive and mutually exclusive attempts to answer the question of human knowledge. It is the intent of this essay to examine how Gilson arrives at his position, which he calls “metaphysical realism,” and to point to some of the difficulties it entails. (shrink)

One of the most pressing concerns for contemporary society is the issue of violence and the factors that promote it. In ____Altared Ground: Levinas, History and Violence__ Brian Schroeder stages an engagement between Emmanuel Levinas, one of the leading figures in 20th century Continental philosophy, and Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and others in the history of ideas. Not merely an exposition of Levinas' original and complex thinking, Brian Schroeder seeks to re-read the history of Western philosophy (...) and religion by going beyond Levinas' alternatives to traditional theories of the self in order to suggest a notion of subjectivity that is not grounded in violence. (shrink)

In this book, Ellis argues that moral and political objectives are not independent of one other, and so must be pursued in tandem. _Social humanism_ is a moral and political philosophy that does just this. As a political philosophy, it justifies the implementation and maintenance of many of the characteristic social policies of welfare states. As a moral philosophy, it provides the foundation required for most human rights legislation. To this end, Ellis elaborates on the theory of social humanism and (...) the need to reconsider the metaphysical foundations of morals. He develops the theory of social idealism as a meta-theory for both morals and social policy, exploring the global consequences of this new approach. (shrink)

In this book, Ellis argues that moral and political objectives are not independent of one other, and so must be pursued in tandem. _Social humanism_ is a moral and political philosophy that does just this. As a political philosophy, it justifies the implementation and maintenance of many of the characteristic social policies of welfare states. As a moral philosophy, it provides the foundation required for most human rights legislation. To this end, Ellis elaborates on the theory of social humanism and (...) the need to reconsider the metaphysical foundations of morals. He develops the theory of social idealism as a meta-theory for both morals and social policy, exploring the global consequences of this new approach. (shrink)