Sous la forme d’une vaste question, « Qu’est-ce que la philosophie présocratique? », le premier Symposium Praesocraticum, tenu à Lille en 2000 à l’initiative d’André Laks et publié en 2002 par A. Laks et C. Louguet aux Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, avait analysé la légitimité controversée de cette catégorie de l’historiographie philosophique. Face à la profusion de démarches intellectuelles qui voit le jour dans la Grèce du vie siècle av. J.-C., est-il possible de dégager quelque ch...

J. F. C. Harrison has written that ‘for each age there is a new view of Mr Owen’, which is proof of the fertility and continuing relevance of his ideas. Not just in Britain and America but today around the world anti-poverty campaigners, birth-controllers, collectivists, communitarians, co-operators, ecologists, educationalists, environmentalists, feminists, humanitarians, internationalists, paternalistic capitalists, secularists, campaigners for social justice, trade unionists, urban planners, utopians, welfare reformers can all find something to admire and inspire in the treasure trove that is (...) the thought and actions of Robert Owen. Owen was a creative genius of global significance, a radical writer and activist of international reputation and reach who has inspired those seeking to change human society for the better. The contributors to this volume include not only many of the recognized experts on the life, work and legacy of Owen, but also work from younger scholars or scholars coming to the field afresh. The volume presents the most recent and original research on Owen. Owen notoriously (and impressively) dabbled in many spheres, and this is reflected in the its breadth of content. The unifying themes are Owen’s profile in his own time, and the relevance of his ideas for the generations that followed. His importance for educational and social philosophy, for political economy and for the political theory of socialism are all discussed, as are his contribution as a philanthropic employer, his political activities and the specificities of his historical context. (shrink)

Early in World War I, Virginia Woolf wrote these words: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be […]’. It is tempting to assume that darkness simply hides the unknown and the threatening. It is more challenging to think of it as Woolf did: rich with possibility in even the most desperate times.We live in what many would readily describe as dark times. These times have brought (among much else) a once-in-a-century public (...) health crisis, the continued redemption of toxic white supremacy, declining trust in and support for public institutions, and growing evidence of impending climate devastation. ‘Dark Futures’ will consider some of the scenes of this devastation and mine them for insights into our predicaments and our prospects. (shrink)

Western societies today are coming unmoored in the face of an earth-shaking ethical and cultural paradigm shift. At its core is the question of what it means to be human and how we are meant to live. The old answers are no longer accepted; a dizzying array of options are offered in their stead. Underpinning this smorgasbord of lifestyles is a thicket of unquestioned assumptions, such as the separation of gender from biological sex, which not so long ago would have (...) been universally rejected as radical notions. In the spring of 2019, a group of Orthodox Christian scholars drawn from a wide variety of academic disciplines met together to offer responses to the moral crisis our generation faces, elaborating upon its various forms and facilitating a fuller understanding of some of its theological and philosophical foundations. In doing so they offer support to all those who question the claims that are so forcefully insisted upon today--a clarity that will aid them in standing up and resisting trends that have already shown to be the cause of great suffering and unhappiness. (shrink)

El presente artículo se propone abordar la obra de Adam Smith con el objeto de identificar una posible “teoría sobre la igualdad” en el corpus del filósofo escocés. Nuestro planteamiento cuestiona el ideario colectivo en torno a este autor, según el cual se lo caracteriza como cercano al anti-igualitarismo de ciertas corrientes liberales. Basándonos en investigaciones hechas en los últimos años por algunos estudiosos de Smith, expondremos argumentos e ideas presentes en su obra que se pueden asociar a posiciones igualitaristas (...) y que muestran que su postura sobre este tema es más compleja de lo que se cree. En esta línea, con el fin de evidenciar la posición de Smith acerca de la igualdad, presentaremos su concepción sobre el surgimiento de la desigualdad y ciertas ideas plasmadas en La Riqueza de las Naciones y en Teoría de los Sentimientos Morales relevantes para la discusión. En esta tarea, tomaremos como principal referente el trabajo de Samuel Fleischacker, cuya interpretación de Smith -que será complementada con análisis propios- tenemos también el objeto de difundir. (shrink)

What is compassion? I suggest that it is, as Adam Smith and David Hume once argued, a moral sentiment that is subject to a great many constraints and variations but is nonetheless “natural.” I also consider Nietzsche's rather vehement attack on Mitleid and current social psychological literature on empathy.

There seems to be no end to moralizing about the vices, but there is too little appreciation of them as mere human foibles and an essential part of the “human circus.” There are also serious questions about whether some of the so-called deadly sins are sinful at all.

Too often, since the 19th century, sensitivity is dismissed as mere “sentimentality” in philosophy and in literature. It is charged that sentimentality is distorting, self-indulgent, self-deceptive. I argue that all of these charges are misplaced or themselves distorted and betray a suspicion of emotions and the tender sentiments that is unwarranted.

Do we love for reasons? Most romantics would insist not. In fact, we love despite good reasons not to love. I argue that love necessarily involves reasons. I discuss the problem of loving someone for his or her looks and what I call Plato's Problem, loving only the properties of a person. I end by discussing some dubious and perverse reasons for love.

Spirituality is often dismissed as mere sentimentality. It is also often opposed to science and the scientific worldview, as if the one is anathema to the other. I suggest that spirituality has distinct advantages over religion and is not at all opposed to science or scientific thinking.

Basic Cartesian intuitions are directed at simple natures, not truths; but intuitions are also a foundation for propositional knowledge. There are two basic objectives of this chapter: to show how Descartes gets from intuitions to propositional knowledge, and to show how his solution to this problem structures his thinking on the main issues in Cartesian epistemology. I maintain that the solution to is to be found in the principle if we perceive the presence of an attribute A, there must be (...) an actually existing substance to which A is attributed. This principle gets its clearest expression in the Principles of Philosophy but also appears in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind and in the Meditations where, I argue, it appears in the form of the Rule of Truth. I show how this principle is derived from the cogito, understood both as inference and as intuition, how this principle plays a role in Descartes theory of consciousness and self‐knowledge, in the case for substance dualism, and in the theory of clear and distinct ideas. (shrink)

The leading idea of this chapter is that, for Descartes, intellectual ideas make it obvious what metaphysical category the properties they disclose to the mind fall into but not whether they are actually exemplified; sensations make it obvious whether the properties they disclose to the mind are exemplified but not what their metaphysical category is. This idea is worked out through a discussion of three stages in the development of Descartes's doctrine of the material falsity of sensory ideas, the core (...) concept of his error explanation of the senses. Material falsity is a set of three defects that sensations have in comparison with intellectual ideas, ideas that fully discharge the role, which Descartes assigns to ideas in his philosophical system. The first stage, reflected in Meditation III, identifies material falsity with two defects: nonrepresentation and misrepresentation ; the second stage, reflected in the Reply to Arnauld, identifies material falsity with obscure ideas ; the third stage, reflected in the Principles of Philosophy I, sees the terminology of material falsity disappear and the terminology of clear but not distinct ideas appear. Other topics discussed include a special application of the rule of truth and skepticism. (shrink)

How can a Cartesian idea represent ordinary physical objects? One possibility is that Descartes holds a theory of natural signs according to which ideas, including sensations, represent states of the external world that are correlated with them. I deny that Descartes has a theory of natural signs in this sense, arguing, instead, that our perception of ordinary physical objects is achieved not through ideas, properly speaking, but through a special act of the mind which projects its sensations onto objects in (...) the external world, objects truly represented by ideas of primary qualities alone. This ”projection” comprises referral judgments that account for the characteristic phenomenology of experience of the physical world but in a way that misleads us to think that our ideas bear a resemblance to the underlying metaphysical reality of the physical world. Other issues discussed include Descartes's taxonomy of ideas. (shrink)

Cartesian epistemology comprises three main divisions: an a priori theory, discussed in Chs. 1–3, a psychological theory of error explanations in judgment induced by features of our sense experience discussed in Chs. 4, 5 and 7, and a theory of natural reasons, discussed here. The theory of natural reasons, based on Descartes's notion of natural inclinations, is expressed here in terms of a series of warrant principles of which there are two main kinds: those that warrant action and those that (...) warrant claims for what is true. This chapter traces Descartes's epistemically ambivalent attitude to cognitive dispositions from the early treatment in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind through to the final treatment in The Passions of the Soul. The chapter focuses special attention on the appearance of one kind of natural reason, reasons of truth, in the proof of the external world in Meditation VI and the striking absence of same in the proof of the external world in the Principles of Philosophy II. The chapter also considers whether natural reasons apply to particular aspects of corporeal things, concluding with a discussion of the Cartesian Circle. (shrink)

Filozofické pojednání vysvětluje z hlediska marxistického pojetí dějin základní otázky společenského dění, úlohu materiálních činitelů ve vývoji společnosti, protiklad materiálního a ideálního ve společnosti. Druhé vydání je upraveno s přihlédnutím ke kritickým připomínkám.

Louis Bautain (1796–1867) has been described as the “French Newman” because of the resemblances between their lives and writings. This essay compares three aspects of the thought of Newman and Bautain: their respective understanding of faith, reason, and development. Both thinkers understood faith and reason in relation to conversion and the realities of life and viewed faith and reason as functioning in tandem with doctrinal development.

In 1839 and 1840, Newman preached four Oxford University Sermons, which critiqued the evidential apologetics advocated by John Locke (1632-1704) and William Paley (1743-1805) and subsequently restated by Richard Whately (1787-1863). In response, Newman drew upon Whately’s earlier works on logic and rhetoric to develop an alternative account of the reasonableness of religious belief that was based on implicit reasoning from antecedent probabilities. Newman’s argument was a creative response to Whately’s contention that evidential reasoning is the only safeguard against superstition (...) and infidelity. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The current debate over aesthetic testimony typically focuses on cases of doxastic repetition — where, when an agent, on receiving aesthetic testimony that p, acquires the belief that p without qualification. I suggest that we broaden the set of cases under consideration. I consider a number of cases of action from testimony, including reconsidering a disliked album based on testimony, and choosing an artistic educational institution from testimony. But this cannot simply be explained by supposing that testimony is usable for (...) action, but unusable for doxastic repetition. I consider a new asymmetry in the usability aesthetic testimony. Consider the following cases: we seem unwilling to accept somebody hanging a painting in their bedroom based merely on testimony, but entirely willing to accept hanging a painting in a museum based merely on testimony. The switch in intuitive acceptability seems to track, in some complicated way, the line between public life and private life. These new cases weigh against a number of standing theories of aesthetic testimony. I suggest that we look further afield, and that something like a sensibility theory, in the style of John McDowell and David Wiggins, will prove to be the best fit for our intuitions for the usability of aesthetic testimony. I propose the following explanation for the new asymmetry: we are willing to accept testimony about whether a work merits being found beautiful; but we are unwilling to accept testimony about whether something actually is beautiful. (shrink)

Philosophers now treat the relationship between Classical Mendelian Genetics and molecular biology as a paradigm of nonreduction and this example is playing an increasingly prominent role in debates about the reducibility of theories ranging from macrosocial science to folk psychology. Patricia Churchland (1986), for example, draws an analogy between the alleged elimination of the “causal mainstay” of classical genetics and her view that today’s psychological theory will be eliminated by neuroscience. Patricia Kitcher takes an autonomous rather than eliminativist view of (...) the reported nonreduction in genetics and reasons that psychology will retain a similar autonomy from lower level sciences (1980 and 1982). Although Churchland and Kitcher offer different interpretations of the apparent failure of molecular biology to reduce classical genetics, they agree that this failure will help illuminate theoretical relations between psychology and lower level sciences. The appearance of the Mendelian example along side the usual ones from physics and chemistry marks a turning point in philosophy of science. (shrink)