Hobbes in Leviathan, chapter xv, 4, makes the startling claim: “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no such thing as justice,’” paraphrasing Psalm 52:1: “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.” These are charges of which Hobbes himself could stand accused. His parable of the fool is about the exchange of obedience for protection, the backslider, regime change, and the tyrant; but given that Hobbes was himself likely an oath-breaker, it (...) is also self-reflexive and self-justificatory. For, Hobbes’s fool is not a windbag, or one of the dumb mob, led astray by priests. He is, in the terminology of Psalm 52, an insipiens, a madman or raving lunatic, whose rebellion against God the King is his own destruction and that of his people. A long iconographic tradition portraying the fool as insipiens, Antichrist, heretical impostor and tyrant king, was at Hobbes’s disposal. (shrink)

Applies and extends the conclusions of the preceding chapters by examining cases of self‐deception of a puzzling sort emerging from cases of fantasizing and imagining, found in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. The author is particularly interested in what can be described as the ‘divided mind of self‐deception’, the mind that produces an imagination due to its realising the state of the world that motivates the fantasy construct and the possessor's eventual acquisition (...) of the belief that the fantasy construct represents reality accurately. In the process of deceiving oneself, he holds, no clear line can be drawn between imaginative activities that are not yet self‐deceptive and those that are. (shrink)

In this article, I vindicate the longstanding intuition that the Stoics are transitional figures in the history of ethics. I argue that the Stoics are committed to thinking that the ideal of human happiness as a life of virtue is impossible for some people, whom I dub ‘hopeless fools.’ In conjunction with the Stoic view that everyone is subject to the same rational requirements to perform ‘appropriate actions’ or ‘duties’ (kathēkonta/officia), and the plausible eudaimonist assumption that happiness is a source (...) of normative reasons only if it is in principle attainable, the existence of hopeless fools demonstrates that the Stoics were pluralists about the ultimate justificatory basis of rational action. Hopeless fools are required to behave just like their non-hopeless counterparts, not because doing so is conducive to their happiness, but because doing so conforms with the dictates of Right Reason. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Fool’s Truth: Diderot, Goethe, and HegelJames SchmidtI. Of the many works that crossed from France into Germany during the “long” eighteenth century, none took as circuitous a route as Rameau’s Nephew. Begun by Diderot in 1761 but never published during his lifetime, the dialogue was among the works sent to Catherine the Great after his death in 1784. A copy of the manuscript was brought to Jena (...) late in 1804, where it was read by Schiller and passed on to Goethe, who immediately set about translating it into German. Goethe’s translation was published in the Spring of 1805 but, as Goethe later complained, made little impact on the German reading public. 1 There was, however, one notable exception: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.Hegel’s interpretation of Diderot’s dialogue in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit has long been an topic of considerable interest. Marxists—and, for that matter, Marx himself—have regarded the Phenomenology’s discussion of Diderot as illustrative of Hegel’s interest in the social and economic foundations of modern society. 2 For Lionel Trilling, it marked an important step in the genesis of the modern ideal of “authenticity.” 3 More recently, the tensions between Diderot’s “dialogizing” of the Enlightenment and the [End Page 625] Hegelian dialectic have been explored by a number of commentators. 4 Less attention, however, has been paid to the fact that the words Hegel appropriated were not, strictly speaking, Diderot’s, but rather came from Goethe’s translation. 5 Before Rameau’s Nephew could appear in the pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology, it first passed into German in a translation that, no less than Hegel, inserted the text into a rather different context from the one in which it had originated.A consideration of Hegel’s appropriation of Rameau’s Nephew thus involves us in questions about the transporting, translating, and transposing of works across borders, languages, and genres. I will begin by examining briefly how Goethe went about presenting an eighteenth century French text to a nineteenth-century German audience. I will then explore, at greater length, how Hegel went about situating this most peculiar of dialogues into his most baffling of books. Finally, I will reflect on some of the tensions between what Diderot wrote and what Hegel attempted to do with it.II. “Now, think of a city like Paris,” Goethe told Eckermann, bemoaning the “isolated, miserable sort of life” to which German intellectuals had been condemned. In Paris one could find “all of the leading minds of a great kingdom all together at the same spot, mutually instructing and advancing one another through daily contact, conflict, and rivalry.” The leading German intellectuals, in contrast, were scattered about: “There is one in Vienna, another in Berlin, another in Königsberg, another in Bonn or Düsseldorf, all fifty to a hundred miles away from each other, so that personal contact and personal exchange of ideas count as rare events.” In Paris “the best from the realms of nature and art from throughout the world lies open for daily inspection,” while “every passage over a bridge or a square recalls a mighty past” and “every street corner has evolved into a piece of history.” It was a city where “men such as Molière, Voltaire, Diderot, and the like have kept up a current of intellect such as has not been found in a single spot anywhere else in the entire world.” 6 Weimar, quite clearly, was not Paris.Rameau’s Nephew was so thoroughly a creature of Paris that the mere thought of rendering it into German might have dismayed a weaker soul than Goethe. Moi and Lui begin a conversation at the Café de la Régence that will [End Page 626] lead them from discussions of the contest between French and Italian styles in music to a consideration of the prospects for human autonomy. In between they will pass over such matters as the social utility of geniuses, the tension between aesthetics and morality, the proper upbringing of children, and the structure of social dependency, pausing from time to time as Lui loses himself in increasingly wilder pantomimes. Along the way... (shrink)

Two claims have been explored, the first, that fool-proof proofs of the sort that there could be if there were a God like the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not to be expected, on good religious grounds (a claim I found wanting); and second, that there cannot be philosophical proofs of God which work beyond reasonable doubt.The argument that there cannot be philosophical proofs beyond a reasonable doubt is supported by an examination of some of the fundamental (...) issues in the traditional discussions of proofs for God's existence, and by claims about the relativity of methodological rules to world-views which, I maintain, the traditional discussions indicate. I do not claim to have proved that relativity, only to have illustrated the claim that it is there.It is my further opinion, but I do not claim really to have proved it, that the failure of religious excuses for the lack of public demon strations constitutes a good reason for concluding that there is no God of the sort described as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; hence that if there is a God, it must be the God of the philosophers. However I admit that there might be sufficient hidden reasons which would offer persuasive excuses for the God of the ordinary believer.Lastly, I have made some comments about what I think is the more valuable way to view the “proofs for God.” Such an interpretation does justice to the otherwise baffling and continual philosophical disagreements better than rival theories. It is time we take these disagreements with utmost seriousness, and one can hardly do that while treating basic metaphysical arguments as fool-proof proofs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Fool Is a "Holy Fool"?Agneta Schreurs (bio)The editors asked me to write a short response to your commentaries. They asked me to do that as a set; therefore, I respond to your texts as a whole.First, I thank you for your comments. I appreciate very much that you took the time to read and reflect on my article. I am really very happy with your positive (...) evaluation of my article, particularly because my choice for this subject has much to do with my own biography. I have been raised by nonreligious parents and grandparents. My mother being a classical scholar and my father a scientist, I knew more about antiquity and chemistry than about the Bible, which in fact did not figure at all in my education. However, when I was forty years old, I took on theology at the University of Utrecht as an extra study in my free time, mainly because I felt embarrassed whenever my students or clients brought the subject up and I did not know the first thing about it. Right from the beginning I became absolutely excited about this study, not only about the broad range of fascinating subjects, but also because quite a number churches had merged the academic part of their seminaries with the theological faculty of the University of Utrecht into an academically very high-standard curriculum. Students and teachers were a mix of Dutch Reformed, Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Baptist, and several other denominations, in my time even a Jewish rabbi and a Winti (an indigenous religion in the former Dutch West Indies). Outsider as I was, this offered me a unique opportunity to become acquainted in a personal and natural way with their various faiths. Nevertheless, it took me three years before I realized what all those fascinating things had to do with my life and with my work! This realization was the reason why, after getting my master's degree in theology, I decided to choose a combination of philosophy of religion and psychology of religion for my doctoral dissertation and to change my group practice into work that explicitly dealt with the interconnections between spirituality and psychotherapy.I also want to thank you for sharing your thoughts on the larger contexts of my subject. From my biographical sketch, you can see that I agree with both of you in that it is high time that psychiatry and psychotherapy pay more attention to—and become more knowledgeable about—their religious patients' religion and spirituality. Not because I think the "talking cures" may have much in common with "faith healing" (in fact, I agree with Gibson [2000] that they have much more in common with the gentle craft of taking confession), but because it is unprofessional not to do so. When a person consults a priest or minister with regard to a religious problem, it often appears that there are also psychological problems involved. That is why theological curricula include pastoral psychology and clinical training courses. This is also true the other way round: psychological problems treated in psychotherapy and counseling may involve a patient's religious mindset. However [End Page 205], most psychotherapists are generally neither religious themselves nor trained in assessing and understanding the great variety of ways in which people may be religious and how these may be intertwined with the problems for which they have sought therapeutic help. In particular, they are mostly not trained in discovering how their patients' religiousness may be a cause of therapeutic failure or, alternatively, a source of support and as such a help toward therapeutic progress. In addition to such lack in information and training, and in contrast with most clergy, clients in therapy may easily have very different religious backgrounds. As a result of this professional situation, many psychotherapists feel uncomfortable in this area and unprofessionally tend to ignore, avoid, or reinterpret in psychological terms their patients' spiritual expressions.The point I tried to make is this: to successfully discover and assess how a patients' religiousness may be a cause of psychological problems or conversely, be a source of support and as such a help toward therapeutic progress, you need at least some basic... (shrink)

Among the paradoxical aspects of Hobbes's scepticism attention has recently turned to Hobbes's fool of Leviathan , chapter xv, where Hobbes makes a claim about justice that paraphrases Psalm 52:1: "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." It is a charge of which Hobbes himself could be suspected, but in fact we see that it is on this startling claim that his legal positivism rests. Moreover it is embedded in a theory of natural law (...) that Hobbes inherited from the late scholastics and that he shares in common with Grotius as a practical solution to the problem of scepticism. Indeed, the fool is not even honoured with the designation "sceptic." He is simply dumb, stultus , one of the mindless mob, or those led astray by priests. Hobbes's treatment of the fool as stultus is Epicurean, as we see in the Historia Ecclesiastica , where he gives the topos special attention, and Epicureanism helps us solve the puzzle of the fool. (shrink)

Christ figures and holy fools are familiar religious symbols often repeated and adapted in film making. They have historically most often been depicted as male, and among the slowly growing body of female filmic christ figures, they are usually depicted as adult White women. In this article, I consider two films, Niki Caro’s Whale Rider and Disney’s Moana, in which young Indigenous girls are depicted within this trope. I engage in close reading of the films, in relation to Anton Karl (...) Kozlovic’s theoretical framework for structural characteristics of the filmic christ figure, as I focus my discussion here on the christological symbolism of the two female child figures in these films, while also folding this back to the long-standing religious and literary tradition of the holy fool. The aim of this article is to contribute to the growing body of critical and theoretical work about the representation and reading of women and religion in film. (shrink)

Advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience claim to have begun to undermine the assumptions of the arts and educational theory community by explaining consciousness through either a reduction to mathematical functionalism or an excrescence of brain biology. I suggest that the worldview behind such reductionism is opposed to the worldview assumed by many educational practitioners and theorists. I then go on to outline a few common positions taken in the burgeoning field of consciousness studies that suggest that—though many attributes of (...) consciousness have been identified and explained—individual consciousness itself remains as much of an enigma to scientists as to the rest of us who experience it. However, I do suggest the necessity of intersubjectivity for conscious evolution. (shrink)

This chapter sketches a literary history of writing the colonial interregnum through the comparison of a canonical Dublin text and its filmic adaptation with a canonical Johannesburg text and its filmic adaptation. Njabulo Ndebele’s short story ‘Fools’ (1983) repurposes formal elements from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), transposing strategies for representing late colonial Dublin to a Johannesburg township during the height of apartheid in a context of extreme racial domination; beginning with close comparative readings of both stories, my chapter argues that (...) the context in which ‘Fools’ emerges determines the significance of its reappropriation of Joycean formal devices and simultaneously forces a re-reading of Joyce’s flirtation with bourgeois naturalism in ‘The Dead.’ Further, the respective publishing contexts of ‘Fools’ and ‘The Dead’ go on to determine their reception and recirculation, as demonstrated by the diverse histories of the American John Huston’s adaptation of ‘The Dead’ (1984), and Ramadan Suleman’s South African adaptation of ‘Fools’ (1997). In following this circumatlantic history of influence and adaptation from Joyce to Ndebele to Huston to Suleman, across hemispheres and media, I mean to articulate a relationship between modernist form and forms of modernity, particularly as those forms that appear and reappear in the global south over the course of the long twentieth century. Particular attention is paid here to the history of underdevelopment in the global south and how it impinges upon the production and circulation of literary adaptations. (shrink)

Justice, equality, and righteousness—these are some of our greatest moral convictions. Yet in times of social conflict, morals can become rigid, making religious war, ethnic cleansing, and political purges possible. Morality, therefore, can be viewed as pathology-a rhetorical, psychological, and social tool that is used and abused as a weapon. An expert on Eastern philosophies and social systems theory, Hans-Georg Moeller questions the perceived goodness of morality and those who claim morality is inherently positive. Critiquing the ethical "fanaticism" of Western (...) moralists, such as Immanuel Kant, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Rawls, and the utilitarians, Moeller points to the absurd fundamentalisms and impracticable prescriptions arising from definitions of good. Instead he advances a theory of "moral foolishness," or moral asceticism, extracted from the "amoral" philosophers of East Asia and such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Niklas Luhmann. The moral fool doesn't understand why ethics are necessarily good, and he isn't convinced that the moral perspective is always positive. In this way he is like most people, and Moeller defends this foolishness against ethical pathologies that support the death penalty, just wars, and even Jerry Springer's crude moral theater. Comparing and contrasting the religious philosophies of Christianity, Daoism, and Zen Buddhism, Moeller presents a persuasive argument in favor of amorality. (shrink)

Don didn’t grasp what would eventually come to be one of the most successful ad campaigns ever because he didn’t recognise the person presenting the evidence as being appropriately trustworthy. He failed to know because Dr Guttman’s say-so was not enough to provide justification for a belief. But why would he think that? To get to the bottom of this, we need the help of an analytical approach known as standpoint theory.

Don didn’t grasp what would eventually come to be one of the most successful ad campaigns ever because he didn’t recognise the person presenting the evidence as being appropriately trustworthy. He failed to know because Dr Guttman’s say-so was not enough to provide justification for a belief. But why would he think that? To get to the bottom of this, we need the help of an analytical approach known as standpoint theory.

Hobbes postulates a social contract to formalize our collective transition from the state of nature to civil society. The prisoner’s dilemma challenges both the mechanics and the outcome of that thought experiment. The incentives for reneging are supposedly strong enough to keep rational persons from cooperating. This paper argues that the prisoner’s dilemma undermines a position Hobbes does not hold. The context and parameters of the social contract steer it safely between the horns of the dilemma. Specifically, in a setting (...) as hostile as the state of nature, Hobbes’s emphasis on self-interest places a premium on survival, and thereby on adaptability, which then promotes progressive concessions toward peaceful coexistence. This transforms the relevant model of rationality from utility maximization to utility satisficing, thus favoring the pursuit of a mutually satisfactory outcome over that of the best personal outcome. The difference not only obviates the prisoner’s dilemma but also better approximates the state of nature while leaving a viable way out. (shrink)

In various professional groups, experts send rookies on absurd tasks as a joke. The fool’s errand appears in factories and hospitals, in elite schools and scout camps, among soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Why are newcomers deceived and humiliated, and why are pranks relatively similar and remarkably persistent over time? I propose that the cultural success and the recurrent features of the fool’s errand are based on evolved cognitive mechanisms activated by apprenticeship as social learning and group induction. Epistemic (...) vigilance explains how novices are reliably deceived by experts using opaque statements erroneously perceived as pedagogical. Furthermore, coalitional psychology explains why insiders use the prank as strategic signalling of hierarchies based on epistemic asymmetry. The intersection of cognitive mechanisms and patterns of professional recruitment maintains a tradition of ritualised pranking in which insiders coordinate to humiliate newcomers to assert epistemic and coalitional dominance. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new interpretation of John Stuart Mill's notion of utility, which is used to provide a utilitarian justification for an eclectic, rather than a vocational, education. Vocational education is strongly promoted in recent policy documents, which makes it important to raise the question of justification. Many existing interpretations of Mill's utilitarianism argue for a hierarchy of pleasures. Although this enables one to justify an eclectic education, it is an interpretation that could be dismissed as ‘un-utilitarian’. This paper (...) proposes an alternative interpretation of Mill's notion of utility as a hierarchy of preferences. Our interpretation not only provides grounds for justifying an eclectic or critical education, it is also consistent with utilitarianism as an ethical theory. The paper also shows how the resultant curricula will better support democracy and participation in civil society. (shrink)

A fresh interpretation of Jeremy Bentham, finding that his “radical foolery” embodied a social ethics that was revolutionary for its time. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) is best remembered today as the founder of utilitarianism (a philosophy infamously abused by the Victorians) and the conceiver of the Panopticon, the circular prison house in which all prisoners could be seen by an unseen observer—later seized upon by Michel Foucault as the apotheosis of the neoliberal control society. In this volume in the Untimely Meditation (...) series, Christian Welzbacher offers a new interpretation of Bentham, arguing that his “radical foolery” (paraphrasing Goethe's characterization of Bentham) actually embodied a social ethics that was new for its time and demands proper historical contextualization rather than retroactive analysis from the vantage point of late capitalism. Welzbacher provides just such an analysis, offering an account of the two great utilitarian projects that occupied Bentham all his life: the Panopticon and the Auto-Icon. Welzbacher rescues the Panopticon from the misapprehensions of Foucault, Orwell, and Lacan, arguing that Bentham saw the Panopticon as a pedagogical instrument incorporating the tenets of reason; construction and function, plan and influence, architecture and politics are brought into alignment. Bentham extolled the discovery in words that could easily be ascribed to Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, or any other modernist architect. The Auto-Icon expressed Bentham's theories that the dead should benefit later generations; these theories were effectively sealed when Bentham decided to have his body preserved and put on display. (It can be seen today in a cabinet at University College London.) He also donated his inner organs to science—a practice outlawed at the time—and posthumously stage-managed his own ceremonial autopsy. Welzbacher reveals a Bentham who raised questions that feel familiar and current, invoking topoi that would come to define the modern era and that reverberate to this day. (shrink)

Anselm: I agreed that Pegasus is a flying horse according to the stories people tell, the paintings painters paint and so on . That is, Pegasus is a flying horse in the understanding of storytellers, their readers and the artists who depict Pegasus. You asked whether flying is not an unmediated causal power . Well, it could be an unmediated causal power if you or I had it, but not if a being with only mediated powers had it. And so (...) poor Pegasus, a being whose powers are only those given him by storytellers and artists, has only the mediated power of flying that they have given him. He flies in the thoughts and depictions of beings with unmediated powers. Still, Pegasus has not only the mediated power to fly but also the mediated power to entertain us, and perhaps even inspire us. Fool: But people could tell stories about you, too, about how you sprouted wings and flew onto the roof of Canterbury Cathedral. Anselm: Alas, if it were only in stories that I could do that, then flying would not be an unmediated causal power of mine. I would still have unmediated causal powers all right, and so would be greater than Pegasus. But flying is not one of my unmediated causal powers. However, something than which nothing greater can be conceived would, and does, as I have proved in my Proslogion, have unmediated causal powers – indeed, much greater unmediated causal powers than any poor mortals like you and me.1 •↵1 For …. (shrink)

Although most consumers are positive about socially responsible companies, in order to benefit from CSR efforts, effective and clear CSR communication is important. However, due to the constantly rising profusion of eco-labels, based on either own claims from the organization or claims made by an external third party, consumers may encounter difficulties in identifying truly responsible firms, which could result in less effective CSR initiatives, even for those responsible firms. Therefore, building on attribution theory, this study seeks to identify how (...) uncertified internal CSR claims and external third-party CSR labels should be used in order to deter greenwashing and increase positive consumer evaluations. Within a 3 × 2 design, respondents are exposed to different coffee product packages measuring their attitude toward the brand, corporate credibility, purchase intention, and scent perception, as well as perceived attributional CSR motives. Overall, findings indicate that especially an external CSR label affects consumer responses toward the firm. Moreover, perceived CSR motives serve as a mediator between an external CSR label and corporate credibility and brand attitude, respectively. These findings warrant further consideration of introducing an external multilevel rating systems by governmental law. (shrink)

Heir to Augustine’s and Anselm’s encounters with the Psalmist’s fool, Hobbes s confronts his own foolish interlocutor in Leviathan. This Foole says in his heart: there is no justice. Hobbes rebuts the unjust Foole’s objection by defending the reasonableness of justice. Readers’ ideas about the adequacy of Hobbes’s response to the Foole vary according to their views about what reason, justice, and covenant-keeping require. A confounding and little-remarked feature of this passage in Leviathan is Hobbes’s claim that his unjust (...) Foole is the same with respect to his atheism as the Psalmist’s fool. This identity, far from being accidental or coincidental, is crucial to an adequate understanding of the Foole’s objection and Hobbes’s rebuttal. (shrink)

"Of Children, Fools, and Madmen: Spinoza's Scientific Method and the Constraints of Fact" Spinoza has been largely ignored in the history of the scientific method in the seventeenth century. Such neglect is unjustified insofar as Spinoza deliberately circumscribed with scientific method both Biblical hermeneutics (TTP), a field which he deserves credit for founding, and political theory (TP). Although he wrote no discrete discourse on method, he wove his scientific methodological principles into the fabric of his philosophical treatises.

In the debate leading up to the EU referendum in the United Kingdom, the British politician Michael Gove declared that "people in this country have had enough of experts". In the 2016 Presidential campaign in the United States, Donald Trump waged a war against the very idea of expertise. Yet if you are worried about your child's behaviour, don't know which laptop to buy, or just want to get fit, the answer is easy: ask an expert. Where do we draw (...) the line? Why do we appear to know more and more collectively, yet less and less individually? Has expertise painted itself into a corner? Can we defend both science and common sense? In this engaging and much-needed book Jan Bransen explores these important questions and more. He argues that the rise of behavioural sciences has caused a sea change in the relationship between science and common sense. He shows how - as recently as the 1960s - common sense and science were allies in the battle against ignorance, but that since then populism and chauvinism have claimed common sense as their own. Bransen argues that common sense is a collection of interrelated skills that draw on both an automatic pilot and an investigative attitude where we ask ourselves the right questions. It is the very attitude of open-minded inquiry and questioning that Bransen believes we are at risk of losing in the face of an army of experts. Drawing on fascinating examples such as language and communication, money, the imaginary world of Endoxa, domestic violence, and quality of life, Don't be Fooled: A Philosophy of Common Sense is a brilliant and wry defence of a skill that is a vital part of being human. (shrink)

After 1807, Hegel contrasts microhistorical chaos with macrohistorical order, the "cunning of reason." Agents interact blindly, but reason integrates all interactions, and this is the development and expression of rationality. No particular state dictates or precludes any subsequent outcomes; to allow the cunning of reason is to deny that causal relations are decisive for historical events. Ends are extraneous to objects, which suffer violence in achieving them. Consequently historical progress must also be regarded as extraneous to the objective social world, (...) and this world must be assumed to suffer violence as progress is achieved. If anyone was fooled by the "cunning of reason," it was Hegel. (shrink)

Although most consumers are positive about socially responsible companies, in order to benefit from CSR efforts, effective and clear CSR communication is important. However, due to the constantly rising profusion of eco-labels, based on either own claims from the organization or claims made by an external third party, consumers may encounter difficulties in identifying truly responsible firms, which could result in less effective CSR initiatives, even for those responsible firms. Therefore, building on attribution theory, this study seeks to identify how (...) uncertified internal CSR claims and external third-party CSR labels should be used in order to deter greenwashing and increase positive consumer evaluations. Within a 3 (external third-party CSR label: positive vs. negative vs. no label) × 2 (uncertified internal CSR claim: present vs. absent) design, respondents are exposed to different coffee product packages measuring their attitude toward the brand, corporate credibility, purchase intention, and scent perception, as well as perceived attributional CSR motives. Overall, findings indicate that especially an external CSR label affects consumer responses toward the firm. Moreover, perceived CSR motives serve as a mediator between an external CSR label and corporate credibility and brand attitude, respectively. These findings warrant further consideration of introducing an external multilevel rating systems by governmental law. (shrink)

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle promises a causal account of how social facts are constructed by human acts of intention, but specifically disavows a special theoretical space in that account for human motivation. This paper argues that such a story as Searle tells cannot serve as a causal account of society. A causal account must illuminate motivations, because doing so illuminates the aims and interests lacking which we cannot explain why these social practices come to be and (...) not potential others. Thus Searle’s would-be account of society has a problem analogous to that of Hobbes, which Hobbes’s own Foole poses, and that Hobbes never answers to anyone’s satisfaction. (shrink)

At present a broad consensus may be discerned on Aquinas' ‘five ways' for proving the existence of God: either he is responding to atheism per se by means of five rational arguments, or he is not responding to any formal denial of God's existence. Both of these approaches ignore the two specific objections Aquinas raises prior to the five ways: evil is incompatible with the existence of an infinite goodness , and the world does not require an external explanation . (...) While some have speculated on the structural significance of the second objection, the first has been universally regarded as irrelevant. This, I argue, is an oversight; Aquinas' first objection is central to the quinque viae. Seen in this light, while Aquinas' five ways are not responses to atheism per se, they do address, and ultimately subvert, a specific form of disbelief. (shrink)

Book Three of Avatar: The Last Airbender portrays Uncle Iroh as wise and peace‐loving, in the mold of a Daoist sage. This chapter argues that Iroh's Book One foolishness is a pose, and Iroh's character does not fundamentally change. In Book One, he is wisely following strategies suggested by the ancient Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi for dealing with incompetent leaders. His seeming foolishness in Book One is in fact a sagacious strategy for minimizing the harm that Prince Zuko would otherwise (...) inflict on himself and others a gentle touch that more effectively helps Prince Zuko find wisdom than would be possible with a more confrontational approach. To understand Iroh's wisdom, it is useful to look to the ancient Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, specifically his advice for dealing with incompetent rulers by following peacefully along with them, unthreateningly modeling disregard for fame and accomplishment while not being too useful for their ends. (shrink)

The debate surrounding eliminative materialism, and the role of empiricism more broadly, has been one of the more prominent philosophical debates of the last half-century. But too often what is at stake in this debate has been left implicit. This essay surveys the rhetoric of two participants in this debate, Paul Churchland and Thomas Nagel, on the question of whether or not scientific explanations will do away with the need for nonscientific descriptions. Both philosophers talk about this possibility in language (...) reminiscent of revolutionary politics. These authors do not see eliminative materialism merely as an idea to be evaluated, but a revolution to be welcomed or quashed. After surveying their rhetoric, the paper turns to the work of four philosophers—G.E.M. Anscombe, Peter Winch, Paul Holmer, and G.H. von Wright—to suggest that there is within Wittgensteinian tradition a ‘nonrevolutionary’ approach to the question of eliminative materialism. (shrink)

The authors of the Samnyāsa Upanisads, manuals of ascetic lifestyle and practice, recommend that wanderers renounce behavioral standards of their formerly Brahmin householder life, including ritual purity and familial duties. Patrick Olivelle argues that these ascetics are thereafter considered impure and corpse– or ghoul–like, clearly lacking in dharma. However, these Upanisads counsel pursuing mental purity and moral behavior, and modeling oneself after the perfection of the Absolute. This essay investigates ascetic notions of purity and identity, and virtues such as non–violence (...) and kindness cultivated in forest isolation. Is ascetic dharma universal in intent, and is it conceptually opposed to householder dharma? What type of ethics is admired by the authors, what type deprecated? Olivelle’s position is reevaluated, as is Jeffrey Kripal’s notion that monistic mysticism does not support ethics adequately. (shrink)

The authors of the "Saṃnyāsa Upaniṣads", manuals of ascetic lifestyle and practice, recommend that wanderers renounce behavioral standards of their formerly Brahmin householder life, including ritual purity and familial duties. Patrick Olivelle argues that these ascetics are thereafter considered impure and corpse- or ghoul-like, clearly lacking in dharma. However, these Upanisads counsel pursuing mental purity and moral behavior, and modeling oneself after the perfection of the Absolute. This essay investigates ascetic notions of purity and identity, and virtues such as non-violence (...) and kindness cultivated in forest isolation. Is ascetic dharma universal in intent, and is it conceptually opposed to householder dharma? What type of ethics is admired by the authors, what type deprecated? Olivelle's position is reevaluated, as is Jeffrey Kripal's notion that monistic mysticism does not support ethics adequately. (shrink)

Why should one be moral? There is a very strong tradition in moral philosophy of attempting to answer this question by trying to provide a rational justification of morality. Rationalist moral theorists interpret this question as a challenge posed by amoralists, agents who lack any moral sentiments, and so who take themselves to have no reason to be moral. Thus, rationalist moral theorists set out to show that, whatever our sentiments, rationality--which is supposed to be essential to all agents--demands that (...) we be moral. Much of moral philosophy has been devoted to the tasks of giving rationalist justifications of morality, and of assessing the success of various attempts to do so. Yet few philosophers explicitly note that the rationalist project presupposes a substantive conception of morality--a conception which abstracts from agents' particular desires and sentiments altogether. And little attention has been paid to the question of whether we ought to accept the rationalist understanding of the 'Why be moral?' question and the conception of morality which goes with it. It is to that question which I turn in my thesis. ;I begin by characterizing rationalist moral theory and the impersonal conception of morality it presupposes. Admittedly, it appears that a rationalist justification would provide a powerful answer to the amoralist's query of why she should be moral. However, I argue that such a justification cannot carry enough force to provide the promised answer to the amoralist. I maintain that the difficulties rationalism encounters in justifying morality point to an alternative paradigm of justification in ethics and a notion of morality which differs from the impersonal one presupposed by rationalism. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is a critical evaluation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival laughter’s theory, and along the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s notion of laughter, and its relation to modernity. While Bakhtin concentrates his attention on a few medieval festivities, this paper focuses on the “feast of fools” (festa stultorum) as a metaphor for carnival laughter. For Bakhtin, clown, joker, etc. represents Medieval and Renaissance carnival spirit, while an animated Mickey Mouse, alongside with Charlie Chaplin’s movie character, appears in Benjamin’s (...) texts as a figure of modernity. Carnival laughter can be cruel, and it was cruel indeed, participated in violence during the festivities. The same cruelty Benjamin had found in a few fairy tales collected by the Brother Grimm. How cruelty and laughter are connected? The lack of common experiences in modernity was the reason why Bakhtin wanted to find a counterbalance to modern atomistic bourgeois society, and laughter could have given it. According to Bakhtin, the spirit of carnival as a collective laughter gradually dried up and in the 16th century it has self-transformed into a novel and became a genre of grotesque realism. For Benjamin, only epic, architecture and cinematograph are able to create the collective experience. (shrink)

According to biomedical discourse, cord blood has been transformed from ‘waste’ to ‘clinical gold’ because of its potential for use in treatments. Private cord blood banks deploy clinical discourse to market their services to prospective parents, encouraging them to pay to bank cord blood as a form of ‘biological insurance’ to ensure their child’s future health. Social scientists have examined new forms of (bio)value produced in biological materials emergent with contemporary biotechnologies. This paper contributes to this literature by examining the (...) social and technical production of value in cord blood units collected for private banking. Value, in this paper is defined as a socio-cultural concept in which an object is made meaningful, or valuable, through its relations with social actors and within specific regimes of value. I draw on in-depth interviews with women who banked cord blood and key informants in private banks in Canada, to analyze how social actors produced cord blood as a valuable biological object. I show that a cord blood unit holds promissory value for women who bank and profit value for private banks and that these values are folded into each other and the biological material itself. Analyzing how specific cord blood units are made valuable provides insight into the multiple and possibly competing values of biological materials and the tensions that may arise between social actors and forms of knowledge during the valuing process. (shrink)

According to sententialism, ‘Otto said that I am a fool’ expresses the holding of a relation between Otto and the sentence ‘I am a fool’. Sententialism is generally considered doomed, but I will show that a suitably developed sententialist account can surmount the many objections that have been raised. I will also show how important it is to have a fairer attitude towards sententialism. For if sententialist accounts are recognised as real options, it should also be recognised that (...) the conclusion, drawn by many, that sentences such as the report above force us to introduce Kaplanian monsters is unwarranted. (shrink)

Grau reconsiders the relationship between "logos" and "mythos" as a precondition to opening theological hermeneutics to discourse from other cultures and genres, other modes of telling and retelling.

In the _Proslogion_, St. Anselm presents a philosophical argument for the existence of God. Anselm's proof, known since the time of Kant as the ontological argument for the existence of God, has played an important role in the history of philosophy and has been incorporated in various forms into the systems of Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and others. Included in this edition of the_ Proslogion _are Gaunilo's "A Reply on Behalf of the Fool" and St. Anselm's "The Author's Reply to (...) Gaunilo." All three works are in the original Latin with English translation on facing pages. Professor Charlesworth's introduction provides a helpful discussion of the context of the _Proslogion_ in the theological tradition and in Anselm's own thought and writing. (shrink)

According to sententialism, ‘Otto said that I am a fool’ expresses the holding of a relation between Otto and the sentence ‘I am a fool’. Sententialism is generally considered doomed, but I will show that a suitably developed sententialist account can surmount the many objections that have been raised. I will also show how important it is to have a fairer attitude towards sententialism. For if sententialist accounts are recognised as real options, it should also be recognised that (...) the conclusion, drawn by many, that sentences such as the report above force us to introduce Kaplanian monsters is unwarranted. (shrink)

In the Proslogion, St. Anselm presents a philosophical argument for the existence of God. Anselm's proof, known since the time of Kant as the ontological argument for the existence of God, has played an important role in the history of philosophy and has been incorporated in various forms into the systems of Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and others. Included in this edition of the Proslogion are Gaunilo's "A Reply on Behalf of the Fool" and St. Anselm's "The Author's Reply to (...) Gaunilo." All three works are in the original Latin with English translation on facing pages. Professor Charlesworth's introduction provides a helpful discussion of the context of the Proslogion in the theological tradition and in Anselm's own thought and writing. (shrink)

A number of feminist critics of Latin American women writers in exile have suggested that women in exile may flourish as they are freed from the traditional gender restrictions imposed on them in their home countries. In this article I reexamine the association of exile with liberation through analysing Cristina Peri Rossi’s 1984 novel La nave de los locos (The Ship of Fools) in the light of the tension between Rosi Braidotti’s Deleuzian affirmation of feminism as a ‘joyful nomadic force’ (...) (1994: 8) and Sara Ahmed’s critique of compulsory happiness (2010). Peri Rossi juxtaposes the prescriptive worldview of the captivating medieval ‘Tapestry of the Creation’ in the Cathedral of Girona in Catalonia, which depicts the Biblical story of Genesis, and the diasporic and unpredictable wanderings of the protagonist Ecks on his journey to feminist enlightenment. I argue that while the novel seems to champion nomadic subjectivity, it also highlights the deceptive charm of imperative positive affect that may function as a disciplinary force, compelling subjects to follow a conventional path in life, and invalidating those who ‘stray’ from it. My reading of the novel calls for a nuanced approach to exile and diaspora that takes into account wider questions of the privilege and ease of movement – or, indeed, settling – enjoyed by or denied to various subjects. (shrink)

Few passages in Hobbes’s writings have generated as much critical interest as the notorious reply to the fool – one who believes it is reasonable to renege on our promises whenever it is advantageous for us to do so. In his reply, Hobbes appears to argue that it is never reasonable to renege on our promises because doing so is never in our prudential interest. The problem is not only that this reply seems wrong, but further that it seems (...) inconsistent with Hobbes’s own philosophical commitments. This research note argues that the reply makes sense if we are willing to read it as an incompletely worked-out claim about the prudence of sometimes preventing oneself from being fully prudent in the future. (shrink)

‘A fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees’, so wrote William Blake in his enigmatic ‘Proverbs of Hell’.1 Of course, in one sense, the wise man and the fool see the same tree – they dire...

This paper appears in Earthly Engagements: Reading Sartre after the Holocene, edited by Matthew Ally and Damon Boria. From the introduction: "In Chapter 6, Michael Butler critically examines the misguided effort to shop our way out of climate change problems. After expositions of some key concepts from Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, he criticizes ethical consumerism in a way reminiscent of Sartre's criticism of voting as a trap for fools. His concluding section juxtaposes two competing responses to climate change mitigation (...) as a collective action problem, namely the Nudge Agenda and the Green New Deal.". (shrink)

This article unravels the complex set of financial dealings that are at the heart of the Enron story and follows the story through the highs and lows of Enron share prices. The key players are identified and their roles described. Apart from the financial and accounting issues, the Enron story also raises a wide range of ethical issues including corporate governance, organisational culture and ethical leadership and scrutiny. These are discussed in the article. It might be argued that Enron could (...) never have got away with some of its practices if it had been operating in Europe. The article concludes that this view may be naïve, particularly in the light of recent media disclosures of the UK Labour government's continuing flirtation with business donations. The Enron story raises serious considerations in a whole host of financial, economic, political and ethical areas. As the Enron story continues to unfold, an article of this type can only begin to scratch the surface of some of these issues and to lay them out for further investigation. (shrink)

A note ofurgencycan sometimes be heard, even in otherwise unhurried writers, when they ask for a justification of morality. Unless the ethical life, or morality, can be justified by philosophy, we shall be open to relativism, amoralism, and disorder. As they often put it: when an amoralist calls ethical considerations in doubt, and suggests that there is no reason to follow the requirements of morality,what can we say to him?Why should one be moral? This question is nearly as old as (...) the discipline of moral philosophy itself; it has been troubling ethicists ever since Glaucon challenged Socrates to disprove that “the life of the unjust man is much better than that of the just.” To find an answer to the question of why one should be moral has been taken to be one of the most fundamental tasks of moral philosophy. And even a casual survey of the history of ethics will reveal that there are many ways of trying to answer the question. (shrink)

This article unravels the complex set of financial dealings that are at the heart of the Enron story and follows the story through the highs and lows of Enron share prices. The key players are identified and their roles described. Apart from the financial and accounting issues, the Enron story also raises a wide range of ethical issues including corporate governance, organisational culture and ethical leadership and scrutiny. These are discussed in the article. It might be argued that Enron could (...) never have got away with some of its practices if it had been operating in Europe. The article concludes that this view may be naïve, particularly in the light of recent media disclosures of the UK Labour government's continuing flirtation with business donations. The Enron story raises serious considerations in a whole host of financial, economic, political and ethical areas. As the Enron story continues to unfold, an article of this type can only begin to scratch the surface of some of these issues and to lay them out for further investigation. (shrink)

Retrieved from unpublished manuscript remains, Arthur Schopenhauer’s Eristic Dialectics has been largely ignored both by philosophers and rhetoricians. The work is highly enigmatic in that its intended meaning vacillates between playful irony and Machiavellian seriousness. Adopting an esoteric perspective, this article argues that the tract can be read as simultaneously operating on two levels: an exoteric, cynical one, according to which Schopenhauer accepts that people are going to argue irrespective of the truth and as a result provides tools for defeating (...) one’s opponents, and a deeper, esoteric level, which functions not cynically but, in Peter Sloterdijk’s language, kynically, as a satirical unmasking of the cynical impulses animating the study and practice of argumentation, especially as evinced in the rhetorical-humanist tradition. Such an interpretation reveals that, while a minor work, Eristic Dialectics offers a sophisticated philosophical critique of “the art of persuasion.”. (shrink)

Bakhtin famously argued that language-as-used is essentially dialogic. One pragmatic implication concerns how dialogicity is established in various contexts. In political discourse, polemic polyphony emerges from the juxtaposition of adversarial voices of political actors: a dialogue in which different voices index different ideological orientations. Polyphonic ensembles establish discoursal scenes and make them recognizable, enabling distinctions such as those between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and between heroes and villains. Overall, they assist speakers in the semiotic mediation of political relations.

The Alumni Office at Bradford University has been operating a PC based Alumni System using Dbase III Plus. This system is now breaking down due to the workload being placed upon it and a new system is required. The production of a new system has been undertaken by Martin Charlesworth, Timothy Hodgson and Ioanis Trikukis as an M.Sc. project. This report relates to that project. A system has been produced as a joint effort whereby each team member has produced elements (...) of the whole system. The result has been a system, which while not fuIIy complete, is in a state which can be used by the Alumni Office. The production of the system involved an analysis of the current system, the design of a new system and the implementation of the design. These stages are detailed in this report. The project has met its aims and its organisation has proved to be an effective method of working. (shrink)

[For a planned Festschrift on William Lycan, edited by Mitch Green and Jan Michel.] Lycan (2022) sums up his (2019) _On Evidence in Philosophy_ as a “dolorous” book. This is primarily because the book claims that the field is infected with non-rational socio-psychological forces (fashion, bias, etc.) and that there is a persistent lack of consensus on philosophical questions. In this paper, I primarily rebut Lycan's second reason for dolorousness. For one, if we attend carefully to his text, his metaphilosophical (...) despair seems to die a death of 1000 qualifications. For another, several of the most important qualifications to such pessimism have been omitted. In attending to these, we shall see that philosophy has much to be proud of. I also offer an explanation for why many optimistic signs for philosophical progress tend to escape our notice. (shrink)