I raise a difficulty for Thomas’s views on the passions I call the instrumentalizing problem: Can well-ordered passions contribute to good human activity beyond merely expressing or rendering more effective the independent work of intellect and will? If not, does that not raise the risk that we are merely handicapped angels? I develop a response by examining Thomas’s discussion of the filiae luxuriae, intellectual and volitional flaws arising from lust. I draw on Thomas’s understanding of one filia, blindness of mind, (...) to help sketch an account of the good habits it opposes: the acquired virtue I term attentiveness and the corresponding Spiritual gift of understanding. These good habits, I argue, render their bearers responsive to natural and supernatural reasons that guide them in the conduct of life. By partly constituting these habits, well-ordered passion makes an indispensable contribution to human activity at its best. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme The Ethics and Politics of Academic Knowledge Production. Questions of who produces knowledge about what, and how that knowledge is produced, are inherent to editing and publishing academic journals. At the Journal of Business (...) Ethics, we understand the ethical responsibility of academic knowledge production as going far beyond conventions around the integrity of the research content and research processes. We are deeply aware that access to resources, knowledge of the rules of the game, and being able to set those rules, are systematically and unequally distributed. One could ask the question “for whom is knowledge now ethical’”? (See the Burrell commentary.) We have a responsibility to address these inequalities and open up our journal to lesser heard voices, ideas, and ways of being. Our six commentators pursue this through various aspects of the ethics and politics of academic knowledge production. Working with MacIntyre’s scheme of practices and institutions, Andrew West provides commentary on the internal good of business ethics learning and education. Inviting us to step out of the cave, Christopher Michaelson urges a clear-eyed, unblinking focus on the purposes and audiences of business ethics scholarship. As developmental editor, Scott Taylor uncovers some of the politics of peer review with the aim of nurturing of unconventional research. Mike Hyman presents his idiosyncratic view of marketing ethics. In the penultimate commentary, Julie Nelson attributes difficulties in the academic positioning of the Business Ethics field to the hegemony of a masculine-centric model of the firm. And finally, Gibson Burrell provides a powerful provocation to go undercover as researcher-investigators in a parallel ethics of the research process. (shrink)

Die Akademischen Abhandlungen (verfaßt 45 v. Chr.), in denen Cicero die Erkenntnislehre der griechischen Philosophie (zumal hellenistischer Zeit) darstellt, bieten eine einzigartige historische Quelle nicht nur für Art und Form der Übertragung grundlegender philosophischer Begriffe aus dem Griechischen ins Lateinische, sondern auch ganz allgemein für die Rezeption griechischer philosophischer Konzepte in Rom. Von den zwei Fassungen der Abhandlungen, die sich wohl allein der äußeren Form nach voneinander unterschieden, ist heute nurmehr das zweite Buch der ersten Fassung unversehrt erhalten (der Dialog (...) Lucullus) und hier erstmals allgemein zugänglich gemacht worden. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Christopher Gill provides a new translation and commentary on the first half of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, and a full introduction to this unique and remarkable work: a reflective diary or notebook by a Roman emperor, whose content is based on Stoic philosophy but presented in a highly distinctive way.

An effective formalism is developed to handle decaying two-state systems. Herewith, observables of such systems can be described by a single operator in the Heisenberg picture. This allows for using the usual framework in quantum information theory and, hence, to enlighten the quantum features of such systems compared to non-decaying systems. We apply it to systems in high energy physics, i.e. to oscillating meson–antimeson systems. In particular, we discuss the entropic Heisenberg uncertainty relation for observables measured at different times at (...) accelerator facilities including the effect of \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$\mathcal{CP}$\end{document} violation, i.e. the imbalance of matter and antimatter. An operator-form of Bell inequalities for systems in high energy physics is presented, i.e. a Bell-witness operator, which allows for simple analysis of unstable systems. (shrink)

The essays in this book engage the original and controversial claims from Michael Boylan's A Just Society. Each essay discusses Boylan's claims from a particular chapter and offers a critical analysis of these claims. Boylan responds to the essays in his lengthy and philosophically rich reply.

Politics as Radical Creation examines the meaning of democratic practice through the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School. It provides an understanding of democratic politics as a potentially performative good-in-itself, undertaken not just to the extent that it seeks to achieve a certain extrinsic goal, but also in that it functions as a medium for the expression of creative human impulses. Christopher Holman develops this potential model through a critical examination of the political philosophies of Herbert Marcuse and (...) Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

It is a joy to be asked to contribute to this commemorative edition of Zygon, in honor of my friend Christopher Southgate. But a narrowly academic article seems not to fit the brief of writing a reflection on Southgate's teaching of science and religion, as one who has witnessed it, gladly, as both student and colleague. What follows, then, is deliberately reflective in tone, with little in the way of academic references apart from occasional links to Southgate's own work—though, (...) I hope, enough of a strand of argument to justify inclusion in these pages. My argument is simply put: Southgate teaches by not teaching, but by drawing out knowledge from students and thereby empowering their growth. He is an exemplar, a kind man committed to the unfolding of understanding, interested too in forming dispositions in his students that will lead to their flourishing as thinkers and as people. (shrink)

The essays in this volume illuminate a central topic in ethical theory: moral dilemmas. Some contemporary philosophers dispute the traditional view that a true moral dilemma -- a situation in which a person has two irreconcilable moral duties -- cannot exist. This collection provides the historical background to the ongoing debate with selections from Kant, Mill, Bradley, and Ross. The best recent work on the question is represented in essays by Donagan, Foot, Hare, Marcus, Nagel, van Fraassen, Williams, and (...) others. (shrink)

Drawing on a wide range of films from around the world, and the ideas of a diverse selection of thinkers from Plato and Descartes to Marcuse and Foucault, _Philosophy Goes to the Movies_ introduces and discusses central areas of philosophical concern, including: *the theory of knowledge *the self and personal identity *ethics *social and political philosophy *critical thinking Ideal for beginners, this book guides the reader through philosophy using lively and illuminating cinematic examples including _A Clockwork Orange_, _Mulholland Drive_, _Blade (...) Runner_, _Modern Times_, _Wings of Desire_ and _The Lord of the Rings_. This fully revised and updated second edition features an expanded introduction providing guidance on teaching and discussing philosophy through film, as well as new material on notable philosophers such as Rousseau, Aquinas and Nietzche, and discussion of a wide range of recent films. (shrink)

Their important exegetical and philosophical disagreements notwithstanding, Pauline Kleingeld and Marcus Willaschek, on the one hand, and Alyssa Bernstein, on the other, seem to agree that Kant’s Categorical Imperative transcends the contemporary dichotomy between moral realism and ethical constructivism. My contribution is an attempt to further elaborate on the third, unique, conceptual option that they have identified. I employ the notion of an “enabling condition,” introduced in epistemology and action theory by Jonathan Dancy, in order to show that the (...) Categorical Imperative enables action and is enabled by action. The Categorical Imperative (as distinct from specific categorical imperatives and moral laws) is discussed as a structural, but still normative, coherence and consistence norm of practical reasoning. As such it is two things at the same time, namely, first, the most fundamental normative background condition of practical deliberation, choice, and action. Second, however, the mutual enabler-enablee-relationship between action and Categorical Imperative points in the other – “not-so-Kantian” – direction as well: individual practical deliberation, understood as the mundane phenomenon that penetrates the lives of agents, is the (existence) condition that enables the Categorical Imperative in normatively-structured action. (shrink)

As early as 1941, George Allen Morgan wrote that Nietzsche’s thought is “saturated with the historical point of view.” It is breathtaking how long it has taken scholarly writing on Nietzsche to catch up with Morgan and pay this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought the serious attention it deserves. Marcus Andreas Born’s study is therefore a very welcome development as a serious and engaged examination of Nietzsche’s “historical thought.” As his subtitle indicates, Born’s approach focuses on Nietzsche’s concept of genealogy. (...) He ties genealogy closely to history by suggesting that Nietzsche proposes genealogy as his way of revising, and improving on, existing approaches to history (18). For Born, as for .. (shrink)

This fascinating study explores the difficulties faced by modern Westerners in their search for a meaningful life. It sheds light on this enduring cultural dilemma through a close reading of four popular film and television narratives: Pixar's animated feature film, Toy Story; Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and The Dark Knight; the television romantic comedy, Sex and the City; and, finally, the mobster drama, The Sopranos. The readings are guided by a number of inter-related questions. First, in what ways do (...) these popular stories speak to the modern West's meaning dilemma? What do they have to say about contemporary culture, and its capacity to illuminate the fundamental human? What are the core problems faced by the central characters and how are they resolved? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, do the four stories that come into focus suggest hope or despair in the modern West's search for meaning? (shrink)

The value of the prohoemia or ‘prefaces’ to Cicero’s later philosophical works, composed in the last years of his life, has not yet been settled. Two schools of thought have emerged somewhat more clearly in recent times: one places a greater value on the prefaces as tools for understanding Cicero’s philosophica as a whole, the other applies a more skeptical approach, using a degree of caution as to the nexus between the prefaces and the treatises to which they were affixed. (...) The article advocates for the latter camp, however not only to temper the recent emphasis the optimists have placed on the prefaces as key interpretive elements to the dialogues, but to refocus their importance as extensions of Cicero’s personal and social networking with other Roman elites of his time. I rely on two main lines of argument: the anecdotal evidence from Cicero’s volumen prohoemiorum, “book of prefaces”, mentioned in a letter to Atticus in 44 bce, as well as a broader analysis of a deeper disconnect between Cicero’s prefatory rhetoric regarding Latin philosophical vocabulary compared with Greek and his translation practices in his treatises. (shrink)

This article examines various (in my view) failed or problematic attempts to overcome the limits of logical empiricism in epistemology and philosophy of science. It focuses on Quine's influential critique of that doctrine and on subsequent critiques of Quine that challenge his appeal to the scheme/content dichotomy as a third residual 'dogma' of empiricism (Davidson) or his espousal of a radically physicalist approach that rejects the possibility of quantifying into modal contexts (Marcus). I endorse these criticisms as valid on (...) their own terms but argue that they have taken rise within a context of debate that is artificially narrowed through its failure to engage with developments in the 'other' (continental) tradition, among them Husserlian phenomenology and the critical epistemology of thinkers like Bachelard and Canguilhem. I suggest that these provide a promising alternative to some of the more extreme relativist positions adopted in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science. Above all they offer a means of relating historical approaches concerned with the scientific 'context of discovery' to analytic approaches that typically address logical, conceptual, or procedural issues in the 'context of justification'. (shrink)

I will argue in this paper that Andrew Feenberg has erred in his claim on technological adaptability. Adapting to modern technology may not always be liberating. Drawing from his reflections on Heidegger and Marcuse, I will explain why Feenberg thinks that adaptability has a redemptive role in the midst of technological domination. I will also show why technological domination still characterizes human relations in the modern age. Advanced technologies including social media, have continued to manipulate people and as such, diminish (...) rather than deepen the authenticity of human life. For instance, two people in a café sometimes spend more time on their smartphones rather than valuing their face-to-face encounter; here, one can point out the lack of authenticity in human relations. This clearly manifests how consumer culture has taken over human life. In addition, it can be said that the notion of adaptability also fails to account for the hegemonic social relations created by modern technological innovations, since these gadgets remain beyond the reach of the masses, thus broadening the divide between classes of people in society. In order to address this, I propose that people should use technology in a socially sensitive way in order to truly give meaning to their lives and to effectively resist the totalitarian tendency of the modern age. (shrink)

The epistolary corpus of M. Cornelius Fronto, the rhetoric teacher of the ‘princes’ M. Aurelius and L. Verus, offers valuable insights into the functioning of the monarchical order of the Principate, despite the seemingly trivial subject matter of many of his letters, due to the unique level of communication. Especially the communication with the domus Augusta provides important additions to the comparable letters of Pliny the Younger. While scholars have so far concentrated on Fronto’s relationship with his pupil Marcus, (...) this contribution focuses on the communication with and about the adoptive father of his pupils, Antoninus Pius, because it makes tangible the ‘rules of the game’ of the interaction between the senatorial elite and the princeps who came from their ranks. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary work of philosophy and biblical studies, New Testament scholar C. Kavin Rowe explores the promise and problems inherent in engaging rival philosophical claims to what is true. Juxtaposing the Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius with the Christian saints Paul, Luke, and Justin Martyr, and incorporating the contemporary views of Jeffrey Stout, Alasdair McIntyre, Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, and others, the author suggests that in a world of religious pluralism there is negligible (...) gain in sampling from separate belief systems. This thought-provoking volume reconceives the relationship between ancient philosophy and emergent Christianity as a rivalry between strong traditions of life and offers powerful arguments for the exclusive commitment to a community of belief and a particular form of philosophical life as the path to existential truth. (shrink)