Medical and non-medical experts increasingly argue that individuals, whether they are diagnosed with a specific chronic disease or condition or not (and whether they are judged at minimal risk of these consequences or not), have an obligation to make ‘healthy’ food choices. We argue that this obligation is neither scientifically nor ethically justified at the level of the individual. Our intent in the article is not simply to argue against moralization of the value of prudential uses of food for nutritional (...) health, but to situate nutritional advocacy in the context of Western liberal democracy that values free choice. We have two objectives: (i) to untangle and examine the substance of discourses on ‘healthy’ food choice that simplify nutrition science and place a moral obligation on individuals and (ii) to establish a more comprehensive view of the relationship among food, ethics and health. Although critical of certain features of the liberal political and moral tradition, we argue that John Stuart Mill’s notion of experiments in living provides fertile ground for an improved ethical understanding of individual obligation and of the interconnections among food, health and well-being. (shrink)

“Moral hazard” is a term familiar in economics and business ethics that illuminates why rational parties sometimes choose decisions with bad moral outcomes without necessarily intending to behave selfishly or immorally. The term is not generally used in medical ethics. Decision makers such as parents and physicians generally do not use the concept or the word in evaluating ethical dilemmas. They may not even be aware of the precise nature of the moral hazard problem they are experiencing, beyond a general (...) concern for the patient's seemingly excessive burden. This article brings the language and logic of moral hazard to pediatrics. The concept reminds us that decision makers in this context are often not the primary party affected by their decisions. It appraises the full scope of risk at issue when decision makers decide on behalf of others and leads us to separate, respect, and prioritize the interests of affected parties. (shrink)

Public health advocates, government agencies, and commercial organizations increasingly use nutritional science to guide food choice and diet as a way of promoting health, preventing disease, or marketing products. We argue that in many instances such references to nutritional science can be characterized as nutritional scientism. We examine three manifestations of nutritional scientism: the simplification of complex science to increase the persuasiveness of dietary guidance, superficial and honorific references to science in order to justify cultural or ideological views about food (...) and health, and the presumption that nutrition is the primary value of food. This paper examines these forms of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics to address bioethical concerns related to the misuse of scientific evidence to make claims regarding the effect of diet on health. We argue that nutritional scientism has ethical implications for individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being. (shrink)

This volume, derived from the Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992 conference, brings together some of the leading figures in the burgeoning field of cognitive science to explore current and potential advances in the philosophical understanding of mind and cognition. Drawing on work in psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy, the papers tackle such issues as concept acquisition, blindsight, rationality and related questions as well as contributing to the lively debates about connectionism and neural networks. The collection as (...) a whole reflects the theoretical and methodological dynamism of this interdisciplinary field. (shrink)

This essay is prompted by the recent publication of a volume of critical essays on Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, along with a third volume of On What Matters responding to those essays. Parfit and his interlocutors often end up either barely engaging with one another, or engaging on terms that are often questionable. As others have done, I question Parfit’s radical bifurcation of a merely ‘psychological’ sense of caring, of what it is for a thing or creature to matter, (...) and a ‘purely normative reason-implying sense’ of those things. But I question it in a distinctive way, by emphasising its moral as well as its philosophical implications. I argue that what Parfit gives us with his ‘normative, reason-implying sense’ of caring and mattering is not an account of genuine moral-normative responsiveness but a morally impoverishing rationalistic distortion of it. In the last part of the essay, I briefly undertake to put my specific criticisms on a wider canvas. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle is a collection of essays composed by students and friends of Thomas L. Pangle to honor his seminal work and outstanding guidance in the study of political philosophy. These essays examine both Socrates' and modern political philosophers' attempts to answer the question of the right life for human beings, as those attempts are introduced and elaborated in the work of thinkers from Homer and Thucydides to Nietzsche and Charles Taylor.

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 Boehm proposes that morality began when a society of hunter-gatherers punished a member for violating its rules. He claims social control of this kind is universal, and that apes have related tendencies. Emile Durkheim had a similar conception of social control in the simplest and earliest societies. But both are wrong: Hunter-gatherers rarely, if ever, handle conflict in a law-like and penal fashion, and the society as a whole rarely if ever is the agent of social control. Individuals (...) typically handle their own conflicts, and avoidance is more common than punishment. Pure sociology predicts and explains the handling of conflict with its location and direction in social space -- its social structure. The nature of morality depends, for example, on the social distance and degree of inequality between the parties, whether humans or nonhumans. Morality varies from case to case. It is relative rather than universal. Boehm therefore describes the origin of something that has never existed. All that is universal are the principles of structural relativity. (shrink)

Motivational self-help advice from President Donald Trump, covering everything from leadership and self-confidence to how to succeed in business. President Donald Trump knows about living the good life and achieving success. With his election to the presidency, he added to a life that already includes billions of dollars, worldwide celebrity, and a beautiful family, despite legions of haters. In The Art of the Donald, Daily Caller News Foundation editor-in-chief Christopher Bedford takes you inside the new president's (...) unorthodox mind, unlocking the genius of his approach to everything in life and offering you insight into navigating life the Trump way. Featuring personal campaign-trail anecdotes and lessons from Trump's long career as a businessman and politician, The Art of the Donald offers you life-changing pieces of advice, including Keeping your message simple and delivering it effectively; Using competition to govern yourself and chaos to confuse your opponents; Cutting out the middlemen and getting directly to the deal-makers; Redefining conflicts and transactions on your own terms; Solving problems with ingenuity instead of money; and Believing in yourself, no matter what your opponents try to say. Written in the style of Sun Tzu's The Art of War and The Tao of Warren Buffett, this is a must-read for every Trump fan (and even the haters). (shrink)

In this sweeping volume, Christopher Norris challenges the view that there is no room for productive engagement between mainstream analytic philosophers and thinkers in the post-Kantian continental line of descent. On the contrary, he argues, this view is simply the product of a limiting perspective that accompanied the rise of logical positivism. Norris reveals the various shared concerns that have often been obscured by parochial interests or the desire to stake out separate philosophical territory. He examines the problems that (...) emerged within the analytic tradition as a result of its turn against Husserlian phenomenology and its outright rejection of what came to be seen as a merely "psychologistic" approach to issues of meaning, knowledge, and truth. Norris shows how these problems have resurfaced in various forms from the heyday of logical empiricism to the present. He provides critical readings of such philosophers as Willard Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Michael Dummett, Thomas Nagel, and John McDowell. He also offers a running discussion of Wittgenstein's influence and its harmful effect in promoting a placidly consensus-based theory of knowledge. On the continental side, Norris argues for a reassessment of Husserl's phenomenological project and its potential contribution to present-day Anglo-American debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. He discusses Bachelard, Canguilhem, and the French tradition of rationalisme applique as an alternative to Kuhnian conceptions of scientific paradigm change. This leads him to suggest a non-Wittgensteinian way around the problems that have dogged more traditional theories of knowledge andtruth. In two chapters on the work of Jacques Derrida, Norris explores the "supplementary" logic of deconstruction and compares it with other recent proposals for a nonstandard logic. Here again he stresses the community of interests between the two philosophical cultures and the extent to which continental thinking has engaged certain issues with a rigor largely ignored by Anglophone writers. By bringing a fresh perspective to questions that have often been considered the exclusive preserve of analytic philosophy, Norris offers an overview of current debates that is at once refreshingly open-minded and sure of its own argumentative bearings. (shrink)

This study makes a sizeable leap forward in our understanding of the philosophical and jurisprudential thought related to ownership and inheritance in medieval and early modern India. A seminal 1962 monograph by J.D.M. Derrett has long provided the best account of the intellectual history of Indic ideas of ownership and property. Both concepts in turn underpinned debates about inheritance that later became central to the British colonial administration of what came to be known as Hindu law in the nineteenth century. (...) Fleming's book clears away extraneous detours in Derrett's work to focus instead on three clear lineages of legal thought that each draw on distinct philosophical foundations. The result is a story with... (shrink)

Appealing to reason rather than religious belief, this book is the most comprehensive case against the choice of abortion yet published. This _Second Edition_ of _The Ethics of Abortion _critically evaluates all the major grounds for denying fetal personhood, including the views of those who defend not only abortion but also post-birth abortion. It also provides several justifications for the conclusion that all human beings, including those in utero, should be respected as persons. This book also critiques the view that (...) abortion is not wrong even if the human fetus is a person. _The Ethics of Abortion _examines hard cases for those who are prolife, such as abortion in cases of rape or in order to save the mother’s life, as well as hard cases for defenders of abortion, such as sex selection abortion and the rationale for being "personally opposed" but publically supportive of abortion. It concludes with a discussion of whether artificial wombs might end the abortion debate. Answering the arguments of defenders of abortion, this book provides reasoned justification for the view that all intentional abortions are ethically wrong and that doctors and nurses who object to abortion should not be forced to act against their consciences. Updates and Revisions to the Second Edition include: -A response to Alberto Giubilini’s and Francesca Minerva’s now famous 2012 article, "After-Birth Abortion" in the _Journal of Medical Ethics _ -Responses to new defenses of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist argument -The addition of a new chapter on gradualist views of fetal moral worth, including Jeff McMahan’s Time-Relative Interest Account -The addition of a new chapter on the conscience protection for health care workers who are opposed to abortion -Responses to many critiques of the first edition, including those made by Donald Marquis, David DeGrazia, and William E. May. (shrink)

In the 2016 American presidential election, 81% of White evangelicals voted for Donald Trump despite the obvious fact that he had little knowledge or interest in Christianity. This has continued to puzzle many commentators, as well as conservative Christian leaders. This paper argues that Theodor W. Adorno’s 1943 analysis of the radio broadcasts of Martin Luther Thomas provides insight into Trump’s popularity among evangelicals. Adorno compares the fascist-style broadcasts of Thomas to a pagan religious sect. He describes this practice (...) as “racketeering in religion,” which effectively results in the “liquidation of religion.” The article demonstrates ways in which this analysis is relevant for understanding the relationship between Trump and American Evangelicals. (shrink)

Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, pundits repeatedly described Donald Trump as a performance artist and his campaign as performance art. Meanwhile, his alt-right supporters were mounting performance art shows, debating the meaning of Marina Abramović’s work, and developing their own theories of political performance. For experts in performance theory, such punditry and provocation is like the image in a funhouse mirror. It’s hard to make sense of such bizarre, distorted images—let alone to recognize ourselves in them. This article (...) insists that, nonetheless, we should try. Trump and his movement pose special challenges to American political culture—and also to academic performance theory. His rise has revealed the limitations of a politics (and performance theory) based on norms and their transgression. It has also given the lie to politicians’ false belief that they (and only they) are not performing their politics. The challenge now—for academics, activists, citizens, and journalists alike—is to articulate how performance works, how it provides models of cultural power. (shrink)

This volume of new essays by an international group of scholars examines the response of Hans-Georg Gadamer to Plato, especially to the Philebus. The book studies Gadamer's interpretative approach to the dialogues and unwritten doctrines of Plato. It also shows how, for Gadamer, reading Plato was intimately interconnected with formulating his own philosophical views. The volume also brings out how Gadamer influenced Donald Davidson in his reading of Plato and his philosophical thought. The volume thus explores a fascinating case-study (...) of the creative reception of Plato by two major twentieth-century philosophers, Gadamer and Davidson, while also clarifying Gadamer's relationship to Heidegger. It will be of interest to scholars and students of Plato, especially on the Philebus, and also to scholars of twentieth-century thought. (shrink)

This chapter offers an interpretation of Jaspers’ distinction between explaining and understanding, which relates this distinction to that between general and singular causal claims. Put briefly, I suggest that when Jaspers talks about (mere) explanation, what he has in mind are general causal claims linking types of events. Understanding, by contrast, is concerned with singular causation in the psychological domain. Furthermore, I also suggest that Jaspers thinks that only understanding makes manifest what causation between one element of a person’s mental (...) life and another ultimately consists in – that is, the particular way in which one psychic event can emerge from or arise out of another. I contrast the resulting view both with a view on causation in psychiatry recently put forward by John Campbell, and also with another view that is the target of Campbell’s attack, which is due to Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. (shrink)

One of the greatest challenges facing materialist theories of the human mind is the problem of intentionality. As many non-materialists of various stripes have pointed out, it is very difficult to say, if the human mind is a purely material thing, how this material thing can be about or represent another thing wholly distinct from itself. However, for their part, these same non-materialists have relied heavily or exclusively on this intuition that one material thing cannot be about another. In this (...) paper, that hole in the intentionality objection to materialist theories of mind is filled by way of providing the germ of a new theory of the metaphysics of intentionality. On this view, intentionality just is partial identity. Partial identity is a concept introduced by David Armstrong and used by Donald Baxter to give a metaphysics of instantiation. The aboutness exhibited by our mental activity is simply a partial identity relation between the mind and the object of thought. This thesis, I contend, is a faithful interpretation of Brentano’s “intentional inexistence,” which the objects of thought have in the mind and which he held to be characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. Some interesting and fortuitous consequences, including an elucidation of precisely why one material thing can never be about something distinct from itself, are then examined, and finally a defense against some objections is given. (shrink)

Should the truth-value of statements be thought of as epistemically constrained or as determined by objective factors that stand quite apart from our best knowledge, evidence, or powers of conceptual grasp? The anti-realist/realist debate turns ultimately on this disagreement. My article takes its lead from a famous pronouncement by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield to the effect that there are ‘known knowns’, i.e. ‘things that we know we know’; ‘known unknowns’, or ‘things we know we do not know’; and (...) lastly, ‘unknown unknowns’, ‘things we don’t know we don’t know’. Whether Rumsfeld was talking gobbledegook, making some acute logical points, or just pulling the wool with regard to Iraq’s disputed weapons capability is matter for debate. Still, his remarks may be useful for clarifying certain fundamental issues about knowledge and truth, especially in the context of assertions - by anti-realist philosophers such as Michael Dummett - that truth cannot possibly transcend our best powers of proof or ascertainment. On the other hand such scruples may have just the opposite (obfuscating) effect when we are faced with a complex and case-specific question, such as whether or not Iraq truly possessed weapons of mass destruction. My article contends that a wide range of reliably knowledge-conducive procedures, while indeed they fall short of absolute, indubitable truth, nonetheless offer grounds for arriving at a reasoned assessment of the evidence and for not consigning statements of the Dummettian ‘disputed class’ to a limbo of ultimate undecidability. (shrink)

This essay responds to Jeff Malpas's foregoing article, itself written in response to my various publications over the past two decades concerning Donald Davidson's ideas about truth, meaning, and interpretation. It has to do mainly with our disagreement as regards the substantive content of Davidson's truth-based semantic approach in relation to the problematic legacy of logical empiricism, including Quine's incisive but no less problematical critique of that legacy. I also raise questions with respect to Malpas's coupling of Davidson with (...) Heidegger, intended to provide a more adequate depth-ontological grounding for the formalized (logico-semantic) conception of truth that Davidson adopts from Tarski. My essay then argues the case for an outlook of objectivist causal realism joined with a theory of inference to the best, most rational explanation that would satisfy this need in more philosophically (as well as scientifically) accountable terms. (shrink)

This article examines what I take to be some of the wrong turns and false dilemmas that analytic philosophy has run into since Quine's well-known attack on the two 'last dogmas' of old-style Logical Empiricism. In particular it traces the consequences of Quine's argument for a thoroughly naturalized epistemology, one that would view philosophy of science as 'all the philosophy we need', and that defines 'philosophy of science' in narrowly physicalist terms. I contend that this amounts to a third residual (...) dogma of empiricism and that its effect has been chiefly to restrict the range of post-Quinean debate by setting an agenda which preemptively excludes all interest in the wider (i.e., critical and normative) dimensions of philosophic enquiry. Its influence can be seen in various responses to Quine, among them those of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty, both of whom adopt a similar, reductively physicalist approach to issues of meaning, knowledge and truth. Where Davidson takes issue with other Quinean doctrines such as framework-relativism and radical meaning-variance, Rorty pushes those doctrines right through to a wholesale relativist (or 'textualist') position according to which interpretation is completely unconstrained by the mere fact of a causal 'correspondence' between beliefs and reality. What they both share — and what thus lays Davidson open to a revisionist reading in Rorty's favoured style — is this Quine-derived notion that beliefs can be explained in terms of a reflex stimulus-response psychology that finds no room for normative issues of epistemological warrant or justification. For it will then seem plausible for Rorty to claim that any 'beliefs' acquired by such a rudimentary mechanism are compatible with pretty much any higher-level theory or description that one cares to place upon them. My article goes on to criticize Rorty's most extreme statement of the case — in his essay 'Texts and Lumps' — and (more constructively) to suggest some ways forward from this post-empiricist predicament. (shrink)

This article examines what I take to be some of the wrong turns and false dilemmas that analytic philosophy has run into since Quine's well-known attack on the two 'last dogmas' of old-style Logical Empiricism. In particular it traces the consequences of Quine's argument for a thoroughly naturalized epistemology, one that would view philosophy of science as 'all the philosophy we need', and that defines 'philosophy of science' in narrowly physicalist terms. I contend that this amounts to a third residual (...) dogma of empiricism and that its effect has been chiefly to restrict the range of post-Quinean debate by setting an agenda which preemptively excludes all interest in the wider (i.e., critical and normative) dimensions of philosophic enquiry. Its influence can be seen in various responses to Quine, among them those of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty, both of whom adopt a similar, reductively physicalist approach to issues of meaning, knowledge and truth. Where Davidson takes issue with other Quinean doctrines such as framework-relativism and radical meaning-variance, Rorty pushes those doctrines right through to a wholesale relativist (or 'textualist') position according to which interpretation is completely unconstrained by the mere fact of a causal 'correspondence' between beliefs and reality. What they both share — and what thus lays Davidson open to a revisionist reading in Rorty's favoured style — is this Quine-derived notion that beliefs can be explained in terms of a reflex stimulus-response psychology that finds no room for normative issues of epistemological warrant or justification. For it will then seem plausible for Rorty to claim that any 'beliefs' acquired by such a rudimentary mechanism are compatible with pretty much any higher-level theory or description that one cares to place upon them. My article goes on to criticize Rorty's most extreme statement of the case — in his essay 'Texts and Lumps' — and (more constructively) to suggest some ways forward from this post-empiricist predicament. (shrink)

The Lotus Sutra: A Biography, by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Princeton University Press, 2016. 272pp. Hb. £24.95. ISBN-13: 9780691152202. E-book. £18.99. ISBN: 9781400883349.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:J. H. Hexter 1910–1996Donald R. KelleyJ. H. Hexter, one of the leading intellectual historians of this century and a close associate of this Journal, died on 8 December 1996. Jack Hexter was a great scholar, talented writer and polemicist, devoted baseball fan, and authentic American humorist, who made wit and facetiousness part of his historiographical tool-kit. He was also an American character, as he made insistently clear in his (...) writings, especially his autobiographical account, “By Any Other Name,” which explained (among other things) why he came to be called “Jack,” why he resisted advice to change it, and other onomastic adventures.Jack taught at Queens College (N.Y., not, he pointed out, the one in South Carolina), 1939–57; Washington University (St. Louis, not Seattle or George Washington U.), 1957–64 and again 1978–86; and Yale University (one did not have to add, “New Haven”) 1965–85, where he was Director of the Center for Parliamentary History. At Washington University he was founding Director of the Center for the History of Freedom, which was devoted to a collaborative, multi-volume study of the history of liberty in the West that would realize the dream that Lord Acton called his “madonna of the future”—the difference being that Jack’s vision is already on the way to fulfillment, with the publication of the volume edited by him on Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War (1992), followed by seven more volumes up to 1996, with more to come.Hexter published books and articles in a variety of fields, finding notoriety especially in his essay of 1958, “Storm over the Gentry,” and later in public jousts with Christopher Hill and others and more retrospective censures of (among others) A. W. Pollard and R. H. Tawney; and he was a master of the Macaulayan art of the review-essay (collected in On Historians, 1979). His article on “Braudel and le monde braudelien” was a mischievous masterpiece of satire which, according to a private communication to Jack, Braudel himself enjoyed in his Olympian way, including the good-natured charge of excessive appetite for facts—“Je vais me dire: ne joue pas trop au Rabelais, sois sage, ne mange pas tout, n’aie les yeux plus gros que le ventre!” (personal letter, 8 February 1973). Several generations of graduate students learned what was involved in doing history from his “The Historian and his Day” (1954), which (like “Storm”), he enjoyed recalling, was rejected by the AHR. He was amused, too, at learning that his article on “The Rhetoric of History” (written for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences) was a harbinger of the rhetorical turn taken a few years later signalled by the historiographical work of Hayden White and others. He was a pioneer, too, in the intensive study of political languages (Visions of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation, 1973), though he lamented the fact that his work on Machiavelli’s and Seyssel’s political vocabulary had to be carried out before the age of computer technology.My first contact with Jack came through my mentor Garrett Mattingly, who was the contemporary historian Jack “most admired” (as he made plain in his contribution to Mattingly’s festschrift). In 1962 Mattingly told me that the plan to publish Hexter’s translation of Seyssel’s Monarchy of France for the Columbia Records Series had to be abandoned because of the first (I think) of Jack’s several heart attacks. I was able to use the mimeographed version for some years before Jack asked me to take over this project, originally visited on him by C. H. McIlwain. It was his suggestion that [End Page 349] we dedicate the collaborative volume, with nice ambiguity, to both McIlwain and Mattingly (who had also been a student of McIlwain) from “two of their deeply devoted students.”In this brief and perhaps overpersonal note (though nothing could be “too personal” for Jack) I will not add further to the store of Hexterian anecdotes, which I began collecting at Queens College, where Jack had already left the makings of a legend in the 1950s. I would just add... (shrink)

Proponents of nonviolent tactics often highlight the extent to which they rival arms as effective means of resistance. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, for instance, compare civil resistance favorably to armed insurrection as means of bringing about progressive political change. In Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, Ned Dobos cites their work in support of the claim that similar methods—organized according to Gene Sharp's idea of “civilian-based defense”—may be substituted for regular armed forces in the face of international aggression. I deconstruct (...) this line of pacifist thought by arguing that it builds on the wrong binary. Turning away from a violence-nonviolence dichotomy structured around harmfulness, I look to Richard B. Gregg and Hannah Arendt for an account of nonviolent power defined by non-coercion. Whereas nonviolent coercion in the wrong hands still has the potential to subvert democratic institutions—just as armed methods can—Gregg's and Arendt's conceptions of nonviolent power identify a necessary bulwark against both forms of subversion. The dangers of nonviolent coercion can be seen in the largely nonviolent attempts at civil subversion by supporters of Donald Trump during Trump's attempts to overturn the results of the U.S. presidential election in 2020, while the effectiveness of noncoercive, nonviolent power is illustrated by the resistance of U.S. democratic institutions to resist them. (shrink)

The months preceding and following the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States have incited furious debate about the authenticity of media discourse in the shaping of reality, including in particular the reporting of refugees from predominantly Muslim regions and their resettlement in Western nations. Much of this debate is rooted in how opposing discourse clans, such as liberal and conservative ideologies, construct a narrative of nationhood around contested views of refugees. Examining mainstream and (...) alternative media from a critical discourse analytic perspective, the article uncovers how two key narratives about the Syrian refugee crisis emerge when the media attempt to orient their respective audiences to government policy through the discursive formation of the American Dream. Drawing on aspects of historicity, linguistic and semiotic action, and social impact, the analysis of the data reveals a discursive fracas between a humanistic perspective on the crisis that exploits a banal understanding of the American Dream and a more dichotomous narrative that homogenises refugees as a threat to the American way of life. These observations add to the growing body of literature that questions the ways in which the media discursively shapes, and is shaped by, political ideologies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hellenistic and Early Modern PhilosophyChristopher S. CelenzaJon Miller and Brad Inwood, editors. Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 330. Cloth, $60.00.There are at least two ways of writing the history of philosophy: the first and most common among those self-identified as "philosophers" treats philosophers of the past as if they were in live dialogue with the present. Only the text (...) is dissected, studied, and analyzed as the interpreter attempts to reconstruct, examine, and occasionally challenge the arguments under consideration. Practitioners of this first way assume that systematic and seemingly internally coherent styles of thought are most worthy of the name "philosophy." These thinkers believe that the term "philosophy," as Richard Rorty pointed out long ago, has an "honorific" sense: philosophy as such stands above other forms of thought, it is regulative in scope, and it serves as something that examines the conclusions of other, necessarily less rigorous fields. The second way is more explicitly contextualist, seeking to understand what a past thinker may have meant in his own time, what outside factors may have shaped his arguments, and how his thought may be part of broader historical currents that are none the less worthy of being remembered and studied now. Practitioners of this way are more likely to believe that ambiguities or seeming deficiencies of clarity that we find in the work of a past thinker are unlikely to be resolved by hypothetical, propositional reconstruction; rather the ambiguities are apparent to us because we are differently situated, so that the study of history is a more powerful tool in helping us satisfactorily access the work of a past thinker than rationalistic reconstruction. (Full disclosure: I am an advocate of the second way.) This volume presents studies that fall into both of the two camps, as Jerome Schneewind points out in his cogent introduction.The volume has a manifest unity: almost all of the articles are concerned in some way with different Hellenistic schools of thought and the way early modern thinkers used, re-imagined, and interpreted them. The studies are often meticulous and all are stimulating. Anthony Long offers a wonderfully synthetic presentation of ancient Stoicism as a coherent system, after which he examines the way Spinoza, Justus Lipsius, and the eighteenth-century Anglican bishop Joseph Butler measure up; unsurprisingly, they don't measure up that well. Margaret Osler seeks to illuminate the way Gassendi appropriated certain aspects of Epicureanism. Philip Mitsis argues that modern scholarship on Locke has not taken Locke's interest in Cicero's De officiis as a tool for teaching morality seriously. Donald Rutherford studies Leibniz's critique of Stoicism, which "centers," he writes, on their "failure to offer an adequate explanation of the nature of moral progress and of the dependence of human happiness on the hope for such progress" (62-63). Catherine Wilson presents a study of the corpuscular aspect of Epicurean natural philosophy among Leibniz and his contemporaries. Jon Miller eloquently and thoughtfully discusses the way Grotius and Spinoza worked with the natural law theory of the Stoics. Among a number of excellent articles, perhaps the most interesting is Stephen Menn's. Menn makes a compelling case that Descartes's intellectual autobiography in the Discourses may be seen as part of a tradition. In it, the writer presents himself as reaching a moment of dissatisfaction with the intellectual customs with which he has come into contact and as needing to strike off into new directions, unencumbered by the vestiges of those customs. While others, most notably Dan Garber, have shown that, as Menn puts it, "none of Descartes's contemporaries seem to have thought in 1637 that they were witnessing a revolution" (142), Menn's study is striking because it shows the depth of the tradition within which Descartes was working. Next, Gail Fine finds that the Cyrenaics, as presented by Sextus Empiricus, seem to have [End Page 207] endorsed "the view that there are truths, beliefs, and knowledge about the subjective" (214). Steven Nadler seeks to show that there is no mysticism in Spinoza's thought, even though it was not uncommon in Spinoza's own day to... (shrink)

Computers may help us to better understand (not just verify) arguments. In this article we defend this claim by showcasing the application of a new, computer-assisted interpretive method to an exemplary natural-language ar- gument with strong ties to metaphysics and religion: E. J. Lowe’s modern variant of St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God. Our new method, which we call computational hermeneutics, has been particularly conceived for use in interactive-automated proof assistants. It aims at shedding light on the (...) meanings of words and sentences by framing their inferential role in a given argument. By employing automated theorem reasoning technology within interactive proof assistants, we are able to drastically reduce (by several orders of magnitude) the time needed to test the logical validity of an argu- ment’s formalization. As a result, a new approach to logical analysis, inspired by Donald Davidson’s account of radical interpretation, has been enabled. In computational hermeneutics, the utilization of automated reasoning tools ef- fectively boosts our capacity to expose the assumptions we indirectly commit ourselves to every time we engage in rational argumentation and it fosters the explicitation and revision of our concepts and commitments. (shrink)

This essay was originally presented at the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy as part of the Symposium on The Evolution of Criminal Law Theory. It is a Reply to Professor Donald Dripps’ politically-based justification for blackmail’s prohibition. Under Dripps’ account, by exacting payment from the victim blackmail is an impermissible form of private punishment that usurps the state’s public monopoly on law enforcement. This essay demonstrates that Dripps’ account is either under-inclusive or over-inclusive or both. Dripps’ account is (...) applied to a number of the standard blackmail scenarios by which theories of blackmail are typically assessed. Dripps’ account is under-inclusive by failing to treat as blackmail Victim-Welcomed Blackmail, Non-Monetary Blackmail, Rebuffed Blackmail, and Non-Informational Blackmail which the law considers as blackmail. And it is over-inclusive by treating as blackmail Victim-Initiated Exchange and Unconditional Disclosure which the law does not recognize as blackmail. (shrink)

Donald Russell, Emeritus Professor of Classical Literature at the University of Oxford, has been a leading figure in several fields of classical scholarship over the last few decades. The present volume collects essays written in his honour by scholars who have all worked closely with him. They fall into three sections, corresponding to Donald Russell's main work: Latin literature, Greek imperial literature, and ancient literary criticism. They are unified by two of Russell's own pervasive concerns: ethics, the concern (...) of classical literature with moral conduct, and rhetoric, the techniques of effective persuasion. (shrink)

Persons and passions : an introduction / Christopher Williams What are the passions doing in the Meditations? / Lisa Shapiro Love in the ruins : passion in Descartes’ Meditations / William Beardsley The passionate intellect : reading the opposition of reason and emotions in Descartes / Amy Schmitter Material falsity and the arguments for God’s existence in Descartes’ Meditations / Cecilia Wee Reason unhinged : passion and precipice from Montaigne to Hume / Saul Traiger Reflection and ideas in Hume’s (...) account of the passions / Lilli Alanen Sympathy and the unity of Hume’s idea of self / Donald Ainslie Hume’s voyage / Janet Broughton Artifice, desire, and their relationship : Hume against Aristotle / Alasdair MacIntyre Hume and morality’s "useful purpose" / David Gauthier Reflection and well-being / Robert Shaver Friendship and the law of reason : Baier and Kant on love and principles / Sergio Tenenbaum Cruelty, respect, and unsentimental love / Michele Moody-Adams Trust as an affective attitude / Karen Jones Trusting "first" and "second" selves : Aristotelian reflections on Virginia Woolf and Annette Baier / Jennifer Whiting. (shrink)