Philosophy and Working-through the Past defends the relevance to philosophy of the implications of Freud’s conception of object loss, especially his provocative discussions of mourning and melancholia. It engages with ongoing debates concerning the relevance of psychoanalysis to social theory, and suggests that emancipation from pathological culture be conceived as a mournful process of working-through the past.

Certain of Kant’s political essays suggest that the project of socio-political emancipation should be seen as a process of working ourselves out of affective attachments to pathological social relations. This aspect of Kant’s thinking is read through Marx’s materialist notion of commodity fetishism, which provides a paradigmatic approach to understanding the ways in which concrete forms of sociality either thwart or facilitate the process of emancipation. It is then suggested that Freud’s notion of the work of mourning can help to (...) clarify the possibility of breaking with the fixated attachments that contribute to our own domination. In this light, the author considers the respective accounts of the relationship between Freudian theory and Kantian cosmopolitanism given by Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler in light of Theodor Adorno’s materialist account of working-through the past. Reading Freud with Adorno offers a more coherent clarification of the concrete conditions of possibility of cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Normal adults recall poorly social feedback that refers to them, is negative, and pertains to core self-aspects. This phenomenon, dubbed the mnemic neglect effect, is equivalent to inhibitory repression. It is instigated under conditions of high self-threat, it implicates not-thinking during encoding, and it involves memories that are recoverable with such techniques as recognition accuracy.

In this sequel to his prize-winning book, The Eyes of the People, Jeffrey Edward Green draws on philosophy, history, social science, and literature to ask what democracy can mean in a world where it is understood that socioeconomic status to some degree will always determine opportunities for civic engagement and career advancement. Under this shadow of unfairness, Green argues that the most advantaged class are rightly subjected to compulsory public burdens, but he also attends to the uncomfortable (...) aspects of ordinary, “second-class” citizenship as well: above all, the “reasonable envy,” “principled vulgarity,” and need for “extrapolitical solace” that will inform everyday citizens’ efforts to seek democratic ends within a political landscape permanently darkened by plutocracy. Deeply engaged in the history of political thought, the book is still first and foremost an effort to illuminate present-day politics. With the plebeians of ancient Rome as his muse, Green develops a plebeian conception of contemporary liberal democracy, at once disenchanted yet idealistic in its insistence that the Few-Many distinction might be enlisted for progressive purpose. Green’s analysis is likely to unsettle all sides of the political spectrum, but its purpose looks beyond narrow partisan concerns and aims instead to understand what the ongoing quest for free and equal citizenship might require once it is accepted that our political and educational systems will always be tainted by economic inequality. (shrink)

For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this pioneering book, Jeffrey Edward Green makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one. Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say. The Eyes of the People examines (...) democracy from the perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people most of the time. In approaching democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, Green rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten "plebiscitarian" alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers--including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others--Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control. The Eyes of the People is at once a sweeping overview of the state of democratic theory and a call to rethink the meaning of democracy within the sociological and technological conditions of the twenty-first century. In addition to political scientists and students of democracy, the book likely will be of interest to political journalists, theorists of visual culture, and anyone in search of political principles that acknowledge, rather than repress, the pathologies of political life in contemporary mass society. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 333-348, May 2022.

Does nostalgia for one’s time at university predict current intentions to engage with the university? In Study 1, United States participants’ nostalgia for their university experience (university nostalgia) at a southern public university predicted stronger intentions to socialize with fellow alumni, attend a future reunion, volunteer for their university, and donate money to their university. Study 2 replicated these findings with alumni from a northeastern private university, and extended them by finding that the links between university nostalgia and university engagement (...) emerged even when controlling for the positivity of university experience. In both studies, feelings of university belonging mediated most of the associations between university nostalgia and university engagement. In Study 2, the positivity of the university experience moderated the relation between university nostalgia and two indices of university engagement. Specifically, university nostalgia was more strongly associated with intentions to attend a reunion and donate money among those who had a relatively negative university experience. Nostalgia for one’s university past predicts future engagement with the university as well as its members. (shrink)

The comprehension of anaphoric relations may be guided not only by discourse, but also syntactic information. In the literature on online processing, however, the focus has been on audible pronouns and descriptions whose reference is resolved mainly on the former. This paper examines one relation that both lacks overt exponence, and relies almost exclusively on syntax for its resolution: adjunct control, or the dependency between the null subject of a non-finite adjunct and its antecedent in sentences such as Mickey talked (...) to Minnie before ___ eating. Using visual world eyetracking, we compare the time course of interpreting this null subject and overt pronouns (Mickey talked to Minnie before he ate). We show that when control structures are highly frequent, listeners are just as quick to resolve reference in either case. When control structures are less frequent, reference resolution based on structural information still occurs upon hearing the non-finite verb, but more slowly, especially when unaided by structural and referential predictions. This may be due to increased difficulty in recognizing that a referential dependency is necessary. These results indicate that in at least some contexts, referential expressions whose resolution depends on very different sources of information can be resolved approximately equally rapidly, and that the speed of interpretation is largely independent of whether or not the dependency is cued by an overt referring expression. (shrink)

Machiavelli can be read as a plebeian thinker supportive of plebeian institutions that, as such, differentiate the few from the many and aim to regulate and burden the few. Yet, like numerous contemporary plebeian thinkers, Machiavelli is mostly silent about the moral transgressiveness required by the advocacy of plebeian institutions and ideas. The theses offered here argue that advocates of plebeianism will need, like the Machiavellian prince, to learn how not to be good. In explaining what this means in practice, (...) the theses also defend the propriety of anachronistic readings, caution again plebeian violence, and explain other dynamics of plebeian leftism. (shrink)

COVID-19 is a highly contagious infection with no proven treatment. Approximately 2.5% of patients need mechanical ventilation while their body fights the infection.1 Once COVID-19 patients reach the point of critical illness where ventilation is necessary, they tend to deteriorate quickly. During the pandemic, patients with other conditions may also present at the hospital needing emergency ventilation. But ventilation of a COVID-19 patient can last for 2–3 weeks. Accordingly, if all ventilators are in use, there will not be time for (...) patients to ‘queue up’ to wait for those who arrived earlier to recover. Those who need a ventilator will die if they do not receive access to one quickly. Many nations now face the prospect that they failed to prepare appropriately for this foreseen risk of pandemic (another issue worthy of legal analysis) and that their populations will need far more ventilators than the health service can supply. For many weeks, the UK has been anticipating a surge of COVID-19 infections that could leave patients queuing in hospitals for ICU care. Luckily, social distancing has ‘flattened the curve’ and this problem might not arise. There is still a degree of risk, however, and other countries will not be so lucky. At some point, during this pandemic or the next, all countries will need to answer hard questions about whether and when scarce ICU resources (such as ventilators, beds and staff) should be either withheld or withdrawn from certain groups of patients solely for the purpose of providing them to others. Attempts to answer these questions can be found in a wide range of ICU triage protocols and ethical guidance documents, many of which embrace the foundational principle of ‘save the most lives’. Unfortunately, this worthwhile goal has generated many suggestions that could violate the law. This article identifies …. (shrink)

Sandra Field, Jeffrey Flynn, Stephen Macedo, Longxi Zhang, and Martin Powers discussed Powers’ book China and England: The Preindustrial Struggle for Social Justice in Word and Image at the American Philosophical Association’s 2020 Eastern Division meeting in Philadelphia. The panel was sponsored by the APA’s “Committee on Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies” and organized by Brian Bruya.

Exploring the concepts of ethics, morality, and decision-making for the law enforcement community, Decision Point: Real-Life Ethical Dilemmas in Law Enforcement offers an inside look at the difficult challenges officers confront every day as they face ethical decisions that could drastically alter the course of their careers. Through a series of real-life vignettes, the book reviews specific scenarios, the actual decisions that were made, and the consequences and implications of these decisions. Focusing on the critical thinking needed for making appropriate (...) decisions, it retrospectively discusses considerations that were or should have been evaluated at the time. An engaging text ideal for classroom use, the book offers discussion questions at the end of each chapter that can be used as assignments, group breakout discussions, or professor-facilitated discussions. (shrink)

The idea of self-reliance is important not only because it is often taken to be definitive of the ethics of democratic individualism, but because its greatest theorists have been uncommonly forthright about a problem that, though familiar to ordinary civic experience, frequently gets ignored: that self-reliant individuality is a basis for not fully supporting otherwise endorsed social justice causes. This article turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bob Dylan who are unusual for so honestly reflecting upon this (...) problem and who, because of the differences in the way they conceptualize it, are instructive for civic ethics. I demonstrate that Emerson and Thoreau imbue their self-reliant withdrawal from social action with a self-satisfaction that is lacking for Dylan, who is much readier to acknowledge the moral costs of self-reliance. This acknowledgement does not invalidate self-reliance but alters its epistemological, ethical and political features, providing a variant of self-reliance more suitable to contemporary conditions. (shrink)

The idea of self-reliance is important not only because it is often taken to be definitive of the ethics of democratic individualism, but because its greatest theorists have been uncommonly forthright about a problem that, though familiar to ordinary civic experience, frequently gets ignored: that self-reliant individuality is a basis for not fully supporting otherwise endorsed social justice causes. This article turns to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bob Dylan who are unusual for so honestly reflecting upon this (...) problem and who, because of the differences in the way they conceptualize it, are instructive for civic ethics. I demonstrate that Emerson and Thoreau imbue their self-reliant withdrawal from social action with a self-satisfaction that is lacking for Dylan, who is much readier to acknowledge the moral costs of self-reliance. This acknowledgement does not invalidate self-reliance but alters its epistemological, ethical and political features, providing a variant of self-reliance more suitable to contemporary conditions. (shrink)

Over the past decade, support for reexamining and reconsidering the U.S. model of ethics review for protocols involving research with humans has grown, particularly for studies involving participants from multiple locales and organizations. The HMO Research Network received an infrastructure-building contract in 2004 that enabled us to evaluate issues in multi-institutional IRB review, examine possible changes, and propose a new model. We conducted key informant interviews and held meetings with IRB personnel, administrators, and researchers, eventually resulting in networkwide agreement to (...) pilot an alternative model of IRB review for minimal-risk, data-only studies that only entailed use of computerized data from our network sites. This article describes the organizational and interpersonal processes that led to the successful establishment of this alternative model, to inform other research consortia considering new multisite review models. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement in neuroscience and psychology that the visual system identifies objects and faces based on a pattern of activation over many neurons, each neuron being involved in representing many different categories. The hypothesis that the visual system includes finely tuned neurons for specific objects or faces for the sake of identification, so‐called “grandmother cells”, is widely rejected. Here it is argued that the rejection of grandmother cells is premature. Grandmother cells constitute a hypothesis of how familiar visual (...) categories are identified, but the primary evidence against this hypothesis comes from studies that have failed to observe neurons that selectively respond to unfamiliar stimuli. These findings are reviewed and it is shown that they are irrelevant. Neuroscientists need to better understand existing models of face and object identification that include grandmother cells and then compare the selectivity of these units with single neurons responding to stimuli that can be identified. (shrink)

Although the primary meaning of Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment is as a sociological condition (the retreat of magic and myth from social life through processes of secularization and rationalization), as Weber himself makes clear in his address, “Science as a Vocation,” disenchantment can also be a philosophical act: an unusual form of moral discourse that derives new ethical direction out of the very untenability of a previously robust moral tradition. The philosophical variant of disenchantment is significant both because it (...) contradicts numerous elements of the sociological version and because it suggests there are forms of cognition unique to moral philosophy (insofar as the derivation of a moral teaching from the very absence of one is foreign to both a religious and ascientific mindset). (shrink)

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watered-down form – the ancients conceived of political apathy as a peculiarly democratic phenomenon that was likely to flourish in (...) tandem with the expansion of egalitarian institutional structures and moral ideas. Evidence for the ancient recognition of political apathy as a uniquely democratic kind of affliction centers on, but is not limited to, three main sources. In literature, the Homeric epic, and specifically the story of Achilles, present apathy for politics and commitment to human equality as synonymous forces. In philosophy, one of the main reasons Plato opposes the democratic regime is precisely that it engenders apathy among the citizenry. And in history, Herodotus’ account of the first debate on constitutions as well as the ancient democratic practice of election by lot reveal an ancient egalitarian interest in using democracy to quell, rather than encourage, political behavior. (shrink)

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s past, can serve as a resource for individuals coping with discomforting experiences. The experience of bereavement poses psychological and physical risks....

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watered-down form – the ancients conceived of political apathy as a peculiarly democratic phenomenon that was likely to flourish in (...) tandem with the expansion of egalitarian institutional structures and moral ideas. Evidence for the ancient recognition of political apathy as a uniquely democratic kind of affliction centers on, but is not limited to, three main sources. In literature, the Homeric epic, and specifically the story of Achilles, present apathy for politics and commitment to human equality as synonymous forces. In philosophy, one of the main reasons Plato opposes the democratic regime is precisely that it engenders apathy among the citizenry. And in history, Herodotus’ account of the first debate on constitutions as well as the ancient democratic practice of election by lot reveal an ancient egalitarian interest in using democracy to quell, rather than encourage, political behavior. (shrink)

The phenomenon of altruism extends from the biological realm to the human sociocultural realm. This article sketches a coherent outline of multiple types of altruism of progressively increasing scope that span these two realms and are grounded in an ever-expanding sense of “self.” Discussion of this framework notes difficulties associated with altruism at different levels. It links scientific ideas about the evolution of cooperation and about hierarchical order to perennial philosophical and religious concerns. It offers a conceptual background for inquiry (...) into societal challenges that call for altruistic behavior, especially the challenge of environmental and social sustainability. (shrink)

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness, which affects sense of identity. While the ability to have a coherent vision of the self relies partly on its reciprocal relationships with autobiographical memories, little is known about how memories ground “self-images” in schizophrenia. Twenty-five patients with schizophrenia and 25 controls were asked to give six autobiographical memories related to four self-statements they considered essential for defining their identity. Results showed that patients’ self-images were more passive than those of controls. Autobiographical memories underlying (...) self-images were less thematically linked to these self-images in patients. We also found evidence of a weakened sense of self and a deficient organization of autobiographical memories grounding the self in schizophrenia. These abnormalities may account for the poor cohesiveness of the self in schizophrenia. (shrink)

In three studies, we examined food as an elicitor of nostalgia. Study 1 participants visualised eating either a nostalgic or regularly consumed food. Study 2 participants visualised consuming 12 foods. Study 3 participants consumed 12 flavour samples. Following their food experiences, all participants responded to questions regarding the profile of food-evoked nostalgia (i.e. autobiographical relevance, arousal, familiarity, positive and negative emotions) and several psychological functions (i.e. positive affect, self-esteem, social connectedness, meaning in life). Study 2 and 3 participants also reported (...) their state nostalgia. Results revealed that food is a powerful elicitor of nostalgia. Food-evoked nostalgia has a similar contextual profile to previously examined elicitors, but is a predominantly positive emotional experience. Food-evoked nostalgia served multiple psychological functions and predicted greater state nostalgia. (shrink)

Recognized as one of the leading philosophers and Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century, Emil Ludwig Fackenheim has been widely praised for his boldness, originality, and profundity. As is well-known, a striking feature of Fackenheim's thought is his unwavering contention that the Holocaust brought about a radical shift in human history, so monumental and unprecedented that nothing can ever be the same again. Fackenheim regarded it as the specific duty of thinkers and scholars to assume responsibility to probe this historical (...) event for its impact on the human future and to make its immense ramifications evident. In Emil Fackenheim's Post-Holocaust Thought and Its Philosophical Sources, scholars consider important figures in the history of philosophy--including Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Strauss--and trace how Fackenheim's philosophical confrontations with each of them shaped his overall thought. This collection details which philosophers exercised the greatest influence on Fackenheim, and how he diverged from them. Incorporating widely varying approaches, the contributors in the volume wrestle with this challenge historically, politically, and philosophically in order to illuminate the depths of Fackenheim's own thought. (shrink)

This article seeks to develop theoretical convergences between the science of nostalgia and the science of heroism. We take four approaches in forging a conceptual relationship between these two phenomena. First, we examine the definitions of nostalgia and heroism from scholars, laypeople, and across cultures, noting how the history of defining the two phenomena has shaped current conceptualizations. Second, we demonstrate how nostalgic experiences consist of reminiscences about our own personal heroism and about cultural role models and heroes. A review (...) of heroism research, moreover, shows also that our recall of our heroes and of heroism is tinged with nostalgia. Third, we make linkages between heroism and nostalgia research focusing on functions, inspiration, sociality, and motivation. Nostalgia researchers have illuminated the functions of nostalgia implicating the self, existential concerns, goal pursuit, and sociality. Our review shows that heroism researchers invoke similar categories of hero functionality. Finally, we propose three areas of future research that can profit from the merging of nostalgia and heroism science, involving the mechanisms by which heroism can fuel nostalgia, nostalgia can promote heroic action, and wisdom results from nostalgic reverie. (shrink)

How do we thrive in our behaviors and experiences? Positive neuroscience research illuminates the brain mechanisms that enable human flourishing. Supported by the John Templeton Foundation's Positive Neuroscience Project, which Martin E. P. Seligman established in 2008, Positive Neuroscience provides an intersection between neuroscience and positive psychology.In this edited volume, leading researchers describe the neuroscience of social bonding, altruism, and the capacities for resilience and creativity. Part I describes the mechanisms that enable humans to connect with one another. Part (...) II focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying the human ability and willingness to confer costly benefits on others. Part III examines the mechanisms by which human brains overcome adversity, create, and discover. Specific topics include: a newly discovered nerve type that appears to be specialized for emotional communication; the effects of parenting on the male brain; how human altruism differs from that of other primates; the neural features of extraordinary altruists who have donated kidneys to strangers; and distinctive patterns of brain wiring that endow some people with exceptional musical abilities. Accessible to a broad academic audience, from advanced undergraduates to senior scholars, these subjects have generated a fascinating and highly convergent set of ideas and results, shaping our understanding of human nature. (shrink)

In this article we respond to arguments from William Hasker and David Kyle Johnson that free will is incompatible with both divine foreknowledge and eternalism (what we refer to as isotemporalism). In particular, we sketch an Anselmian account of time and freedom, briefly defend the view against Hasker's critique, and then respond in more depth to Johnson's claim that Anselmian freedom is incompatible with free will because it entails that our actions are 'ontologically necessary'. In defending Anselmian freedom we argue (...) that our ordinary intuitions do not support Johnson's case and that Anselmian freedom is compatible with deliberation. (shrink)

The scientific, ethical, and policy issues raised by research involving the engraftment of human neural stem cells into the brains of nonhuman primates are explored by an interdisciplinary working group in this Policy Forum. The authors consider the possibility that this research might alter the cognitive capacities of recipient great apes and monkeys, with potential significance for their moral status.

This paper investigates how environmental structure, given the innate properties of a population, affects the degree to which this population can adapt to the environment. The model we explore involves simple agents in a 2-d world which can sense a local food distribution and, as specified by their genomes, move to a new location and ingest the food there. Adaptation in this model consists of improving the genomic sensorimotor mapping so as to maximally exploit the environmental resources. We vary environmental (...) structure to see its specific effect on adaptive success. In our investigation, two properties of environmental structure, conditioned by the sensorimotor capacities of the agents, have emerged as significant factors in determining adaptive success: (1) the information content of the environment which quantifies the diversity of conditions sensed, and (2) the expected utility for optimal action. These correspond to the syntactic and pragmatic aspects of environmental information, respectively. We find that the ratio of expected utility to information content predicts adaptive success measured by population gain and information content alone predicts the fraction of ideal utility achieved. These quantitative methods and specific conclusions should aid in understanding the effects of environmental structure on evolutionary adaptation in a wide range of evolving systems, both artificial and natural. (shrink)

This essay introduces a Common Knowledge symposium on the relationship between texts (for instance, musical scores or dramatic scripts) and performance in the arts by drawing out its implications for the interpretation of publicly consequential texts (such as constitutions, legal statutes, and canon law). Arguing that judges and clerics could learn much from studying the work of Philip Gossett and other practitioners of textual criticism in the arts, the essay suggests that a wider array of choices exists for legal interpretation (...) than the usual alternative between originalism or literalism, on the one hand, and intuitionism, on the other hand. Contributions to the symposium (titled “Between Text and Performance”) emphasize what Roger Moseley calls “improvisatory fluency in historical idioms,” and this introduction recommends that jurists develop for the law the kind of “ear” that musicians must have when a score invites or demands improvisation. (shrink)

In this introduction to the fourth part of an ongoing symposium on quietism, Perl, the editor of the sponsoring journal Common Knowledge, remarks on a new question raised in this latest grouping of articles. Can there be such a thing as a “mezza voce quietism”? Can there be activist quietists or quietist activists or active teachers of quietism without self-contradiction? Perl takes Gandhi and “passive resistance” as his own test case, concluding that Gandhi was a teacher of quietism and that (...) satyagraha was a type of moral education directed at those (first the South Africans, then, more momentously, the British in India) whose spirits were imperiled by their self-confident certainty and whose manners were spoiled by their indelicacy and intrusiveness. (shrink)

A recent article in this Journal argued that insider trading is an unethical practice leading to an inefficiently functioning market. The debate on this topic has primarily pitted ethical defenses of prohibition against economic arguments extolling its allowance. In addition to being incomplete, this approach ignores other unwanted economic effects of prohibition itself and unethical implications of its existence. This article shows that Adam Smith's free market concept, when properly interpreted, provides all the incentive structure necessary for an efficient and (...) ethical marketplace even when insider trading is permitted. (shrink)

Abstract This essay takes up the fundamental question of the proper place of history in the study of political thought through critical engagement with Mark Bevir's seminal work, The Logic of the History of Ideas . While I accept the claim of Bevir, as well as of other exponents of the so-called “Cambridge School,“ that there is a conceptual difference between historical and non-historical modes of reading past works of political philosophy, I resist the suggestion that this conceptual differentiation itself (...) justifies the specialization, among practicing intellectuals, between historians of ideas and others who read political-philosophical texts non-historically. Over and against the figure of the historian of ideas, who interprets political thought only in the manner of a historian, I defend the ideal of the pupil, who in studying past traditions of political thought also seeks to extend and modify them in light of contemporary problems and concerns. Against Bevir, I argue that the mixture of historical and non-historical modes of learning, in the manner of the pupil, need not do damage to the historian of ideas' commitment to scholarship that is non-anachronistic, objective, and non-indeterminate. (shrink)

Although the primary meaning of Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment is as a sociological condition (the retreat of magic and myth from social life through processes of secularization and rationalization), as Weber himself makes clear in his address, “Science as a Vocation,” disenchantment can also be a philosophical act: an unusual form of moral discourse that derives new ethical direction out of the very untenability of a previously robust moral tradition. The philosophical variant of disenchantment is significant both because it (...) contradicts numerous elements of the sociological version and because it suggests there are forms of cognition unique to moral philosophy (insofar as the derivation of a moral teaching from the very absence of one is foreign to both a religious and ascientific mindset). (shrink)

Although the primary meaning of Max Weber’s concept of disenchantment is as a sociological condition (the retreat of magic and myth from social life through processes of secularization and rationalization), as Weber himself makes clear in his address, “Science as a Vocation,” disenchantment can also be a philosophical act: an unusual form of moral discourse that derives new ethical direction out of the very untenability of a previously robust moral tradition. The philosophical variant of disenchantment is significant both because it (...) contradicts numerous elements of the sociological version and because it suggests there are forms of cognition unique to moral philosophy (insofar as the derivation of a moral teaching from the very absence of one is foreign to both a religious and ascientific mindset). (shrink)