Reviewing works by James Alison, Alistair McFadyen, Andrew Sung Park, Ted Peters, and Solomon Schimmel, the author suggests that the status and function of the discourse/doctrine of sin highlight tensions between theology and ethics in ways that suggest the character, limits, and promise of religious ethics. This literature commends attention to sin-talk because it helps religious ethicists to render more adequately the dynamics of human agency, sociality, and culture and because it raises questions about the nature and task of (...) theology, faith, and morality. Yet these volumes also indicate that religious ethics should pay more attention to particular sins. (shrink)
Alison Wylie is one of the few full-time academic philosophers of the social and historical sciences on the planet today. And fortunately for us, she happens to specialise in archaeology! After emerging onto the archaeological theory scene in the mid-1980s with her work on analogy, she has continued to work on philosophical questions raised by archaeological practice. In particular, she explores the status of evidence and ideals of objectivity in contemporary archaeology: how do we think we know about the (...) past? Her other key interests include feminist initiatives in Anglo-American archaeology, and ethical conflicts in current archaeological practice. Kathryn Denning recently asked about her adventures in archaeology and academia and her thoughts on archaeology’s past, present, and future. (shrink)
In this wide-ranging interview with three members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sao Paolo (Brazil) Wylie explains how she came to work on philosophical issues raised in and by archaeology, describes the contextualist challenges to ‘received view’ models of confirmation and explanation in archaeology that inform her work on the status of evidence and contextual ideals of objectivity, and discusses the role of non-cognitive values in science. She also is pressed to explain what’s feminist about feminist (...) research and in that connection outlines her account of feminist standpoint theory and the relevance of feminist analysis to science. (shrink)
In his long scholarly career, Paul Oskar Kristeller produced an extraordinary number of seminal books and articles, one of which was the 1967 monograph Le Thomisme et la pensée italienne de la Renaissance, which presented the evidence for the intellectual vitality of Thomism in the Italian Renaissance. In 2017, on the fiftieth anniversary of Kristeller's book, the collection of articles under review was presented originally as papers at the Chicago meeting of the Renaissance Society of America and brought together for (...) publication in record time by Alison Frazier. The articles pay tribute to Kristeller by offering fresh contributions on Renaissance Thomism. Paul Richard Blum, at the start, and Kent Emery... (shrink)
Alison L. LaCroix is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where she specializes in legal history, federalism, constitutional law and questions of jurisdiction. She has written a fine, scholarly volume on the intellectual origins of American federalism. LaCroix holds the JD degree (Yale, 1999) and a Ph.D. in history (Harvard, 2007). According to the author, to fully understand the origins of American federalism, we must look beyond the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and range over (...) the colonial, revolutionary, and founding periods including developments in the early republic. LaCroix questions both the idea that American federalism originated, all at once, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the idea that republican ideology (with its strong emphasis on legislative power) was the single dominant framework of eighteenth-century American political thought. Versions and elements of federalist or con-federative ideas were also long present and in a process of development. (shrink)
In the course of my efforts to distinguish and relate the methods and achievements of René Girard and James Alison, I have developed the hypothesis that a particular pair of theological terms might provide a helpful conceptual tool for carrying out this task—fides quae creditur and fides qua creditur. These terms were given their classic formulation within Protestant scholasticism at the beginning of the seventeenth century, where they were used to distinguish between two dimensions of Christian faith: the “object” (...) or “content” of faith , and the kind of activity that faith is or the form that it takes within the subject .My proposal, stated most briefly, is that Alison’s use of Girard’s .. (shrink)
Alison Jaggar, in her treatment of feminist discourse ethics, expresses worries about using “idealized and imaginary communities” as elucidatory tools for discursive ethics. In response, this paper presents the history of 924 Gilman as a case study of a non-imagined and real discursive community. While the example of 924 Gilman, with its overtly feminist agenda and democratic ethos, bolsters Jaggar’s claims about the need for “closed communities” within discourse ethics, it also challenges some of her basic assumptions and raises (...) important pragmatic and theoretical criticisms against discourse ethics. (shrink)
Feminist bioethicists of a variety of persuasions discuss the 2013 case of Marlise Munoz, a pregnant woman whose medical care was in dispute after she became brain dead.
This essay concerns the theories of the sublime proposed by Alexander Gerard, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Archibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart. All four thinkers, I argue, aim to provide a philosophical account of the unity of the concept of the sublime, i.e., to respond to the question: what might all objects, art works, etc. that have been identified as sublime (or “grand”) in the philosophical, literary, art-theoretical, and rhetorical tradition have in common? Yet because they find the objects called (...) “sublime” to be so disparate, and because – contra Burke and Kant, the classical philosophical theorists of the sublime, they cannot identify one single feeling that could define the experience of the sublime, they ultimately endorse (what we would call) a “family-resemblance” view of the sublime: certain objects cause in us certain feelings (and so are classed together); other objects are then (for other reasons, i.e., not because they give us similar feelings) associated with some of the previous objects – and therefore we take these objects, and the feelings they may arouse, as sublime as well. Some – notably Gerard and Allison – take our act of appreciation of the sublime to be itself an act of free imaginative association, connecting the perceived object to other objects, memories, feelings, etc. The importance of association in aesthetic appreciation itself might also suggest that the category of the sublime must be a pluralistic and open one: because we may always find new objects sublime, via new associations. As a result, I suggest, these thinkers – by contrast to many other writers on the sublime – allow that art can be as sublime, or even more sublime, than natural objects and indeed can render natural objects sublime. (shrink)
