In a recent paper, Schlegel states “... the photon clock when interpreted as a device for showing the Lorentz transformation of time does actually involve a violation of basic relativity principles.” His conclusion is false, and is based on an incorrect analysis of the photon clock in two reference frames with relative motion. The purpose of this note is to present a corrected analysis and show that such an analysis is consistent with basic relativity principles.

Introduction -- Part I: The classical problems of epistemology -- Descartes's epistemology -- The concept of knowledge -- The problem of induction -- A priori justification and knowledge -- Immediate experience -- Knowledge of the external world -- Some further epistemological issues : other minds, testimony, and memory -- Part II: Contemporary responses to the cartesian epistemological program -- Introduction to part II -- Foundationalism and coherentism -- Internalism and externalism -- Quine and naturalized epistemology -- Knowledge and skepticism.

One of the many problems that would have t o be solved by a satisfactory theory of empirical knowledge, perhaps the most central is a general structural problem which I shall call the epistemic regress problem: the problem of how to avoid an in- finite and presumably vicious regress of justification in ones account of the justifica- tion of empirical beliefs. Foundationalist theories of empirical knowledge, as we shall see further below, attempt t o avoid the regress by locating a (...) class of empirical beliefs whose justification does not depend on that of other empirical beliefs. Extemalist theories, the topic of the present paper, represent one species of foundationalism. (shrink)

I argue for the use of the adjunction operator (adding a single new element to an existing set) as a basis for building a finitary set theory. It allows a simplified axiomatization for the first-order theory of hereditarily finite sets based on an induction schema and a rigorous characterization of the primitive recursive set functions. The latter leads to a primitive recursive presentation of arithmetical operations on finite sets.

The best things in my Ufe have come to me by accident and this book results from one such accident: my having the opportunity, out of the blue, to go to work as H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. 's, research assistant at the Institute for the Medical Humanities in the University of Texas Medi cal Branch at Galveston, Texas, in 1974, on the recommendation of our teacher at the University of Texas at Austin, Irwin C. Lieb. During that summer Tris "lent" (...) me to Chester Bums, who has done important schol arly work over the years on the history of medical ethics. I was just finding out what bioethics was and Chester sent me to the rare book room of the Medical Branch Library to do some work on something called "medical deontology. " I discovered that this new field of bioethics had a history. This string of accidents continued, in 1975, when Warren Reich (who in 1979 made the excellent decisions to hire me to the faculty in bioethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and to persuade Andre Hellegers to appoint me to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics) took Tris Engelhardt's word for it that I could write on the history of modem medical ethics for Warren's major new project, the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Warren then asked me to write on eighteenth-century British medical ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I present a novel account of achievement and I argue that, all other things being equal, the presence of this particular type of achievement in a person’s life makes that life more meaningful. In arguing for this conclusion, I explore the connections between m-achievements and a person’s self-conception and especially the idea that m-achievements provide a reason for the revision of one’s self-conception.

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism, phenomenalism, and a third view that is called either naïve realism or direct realism. I have always found the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is to try to figure out what direct realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to seeing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other two views and to (...) representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that it does not—that what is right in direct realist views turns out to have little bearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

As part of a vigorous debate about the politics of multiculturalism, Will Kymlicka has sought to find grounds within liberal political theory to defend rights for cultural groups. Kymlicka argues that the individual's ability to choose the good life necessarily takes place in a cultural context such that access to one's ethnic or national culture constitutes a condition of autonomy. Thus, in liberal societies where the culture of minority ethnic groups or nations is under threat, these groups should enjoy certain (...) special rights so as to up hold the autonomy of their individual members. However, Kymlicka's ‘liberal nationalist' argument relies on a problematic isomorphism between culture and identity. Very simply, I shall argue that an individual's culture is not necessarily given by their membership of an ethnic group or nation, thus breaking the link between individual autonomy and rights for ethnic groups or nations. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.21(3) 2002: 180-189. (shrink)

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism, phenomenalism, and a third view that is called either naïve realism or direct realism. I have always found the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is to try to figure out what direct realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to seeing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other two views and to (...) representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that it does not—that what is right in direct realist views turns out to have little bearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

In non-ideal theory, the political philosopher seeks to identify an injustice, synthesize social scientific work to diagnose its underlying causes, and propose morally permissible and potentially efficacious remedies. This paper explores the role in non-ideal theory of the identification of a plausible agent of change who might bring about the proposed remedies. I argue that the question of the agent of change is connected with the other core tasks of diagnosing injustice and proposing practical remedies. In this connection, I criticize (...) two linked postures that nonideal theorists sometimes adopt: a technocratic mode of neutral policy recommendation, whereby philosophers say what “we” must do to address some problem, without attending to the way agency enters the problem and its possible resolution; and the tendency to treat non-ideal theory as primarily consisting int eh enumeration of duties we are failing to fulfill, and specification of who is under what additional duties in light of this shortfall. My argument is that these tendencies fail to register in a coherent way the practical character of political philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Past and Future of Utopian StudiesLaurence Davis (bio)This critical forum on “The Past and Future of Utopian Studies” originated as a roundtable discussion at the conference, “Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies,” held at the University of Brighton in July 2022. The title of the conference reflected a determination on the part of the program coordination team—Patricia McManus (University of Brighton), Laurence Davis (University College Cork), (...) Siân Adiseshiah (Loughborough University), Antonis Balasopoulos (University of Cyprus), Tom Moylan (University of Limerick), Michael G. Kelly (University of Limerick), Emrah Atasoy (Cappadocia University), and Ross Sparkes (University of Brighton)—to make the conference an inclusive and potentially radically transformative event, one that would challenge entrenched orthodoxies in the field of utopian studies and help scholars and activists chart new directions in utopian scholarship and practice.This transformative ethos was reflected in the collaboratively produced conference call for papers, which stipulated that the event was dedicated to an exploration of radical utopian thinking and revolutionary praxis. The conference, we emphasized, was intended to create a welcoming and broadly [End Page 478] inclusive space where participants could explore the role of utopian thinking, imagination, and practice in addressing some of the fundamental challenges of our times. Towards this end we appended to the call a section, entitled “USS and Utopia Beyond the University,” in which we noted that our aim was to design a program that would center work intended to blur or break the well-policed and expensive borders between the university and the communities within which universities sit. We proposed, and indeed later fulfilled the promise, to work with local activists in Brighton to establish some in-person and remote-access events that would highlight and explore radical hope as it is present in the politics of migrant solidarity, co-housing initiatives, and anarchist and queer groups and spaces. We also explicitly invited contributions from those working outside the formal limits of academia or who were inside academic spaces pushing out. The enthusiastic response to the call for papers exceeded all expectations, and the resulting conference program was exceptionally varied and promising and indeed suggestive of many possible new directions in utopian studies. What follows in this special section of Utopian Studies is a product of one very lively five-person conference panel that I co-organized with Antonis Balasopoulos (University of Cyprus).The chief impetus for the transformation from conference panel to special journal section was an email invitation from the then-editor of Utopian Studies, who had attended the session and who subsequently invited us to revise and elaborate the talks for publication in the journal. Interestingly, the journal editor suggested that the contributions might provide answers to two questions: first, “where do you see the value of utopian studies in our dark times?” and second, “how can utopia and utopianism inspire activism and political changes?”In response, and speaking in my capacity as the panel chair and prospective editor of the special section, I noted that while it would be fascinating to see the contributors address questions of the value of utopian studies in our dark times, and specifically how utopia and utopianism might inspire activism and political change, such a remit would not get to the heart of what was distinctive about either our panel or the Brighton conference as a whole. The Brighton conference was dedicated specifically to an exploration of radical utopian thinking and revolutionary practice. And its title, “Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies” suggested that utopia can be a catalyst for transformative change only if the study of utopia(s) is itself open, or “opened,” to radical influences. In our panel we explored both the past and some possible futures of utopian studies and considered “new [End Page 479] directions” that might facilitate more radical utopian thinking and revolutionary practice. While all of the contributors celebrated utopia’s transformative potential, they also criticized aspects of the field of utopian studies that arguably have limited that transformative potential, including its “blind spots” in relation to the “organizational imaginary” (Balasopoulos), its own privileged “whiteness” and colonial prerogatives (Edwards), its Anglo-American focus and tendency to overlook significant social movements outside... (shrink)

I Conceptual Foundations Ethical problems emerging from modern medical technology have been evaluated on an issue-by-issue basis. ...

Ordinal addition and multiplication can be extended in a natural way to all sets. I survey the structure of the sets under these operations. In particular, the natural partial ordering associated with addition of sets is shown to be a tree. This allows us to prove that any set has a unique representation as a sum of additively irreducible sets, and that the non-empty elements of any model of set theory can be partitioned into infinitely many submodels, each isomorphic to (...) the original model. Also any model of set theory has an isomorphic extension in which the empty set of the original model is non-empty. Among other results, the relations between the arithmetical operations and the transitive closure and the adductive hierarchy are elucidated. (shrink)

This paper shows that low-level generalisations in argument structure constructions are crucial to understanding the concept of alternation: low-level generalisations inform and constrain more schematic generalisations and thus constructional meaning. On the basis of an analysis of the causative alternation in English, and more specifically of the theme, I show that each construction has its own schematic meaning. This analysis is conducted on a dataset composed of 11,554 instances of the intransitive non-causative construction and the transitive causative construction. The identification (...) of lower-level generalisations feeds into the idea that language acquisition is organic and abstractions are formed only gradually from exposure to input. So far, most of the literature on argument structure constructions has focused on the verb itself, and thus fails to capture these generalisations. I make up for this deficit through an in-depth analysis of the causative alternation. (shrink)

In virtue of what do the utterances we make mean what they do? What facts about these signs, about us, and about our environment make it the case that they have the meanings they do? According to a tradition stemming from H.P. Grice through David Lewis and Stephen Schiffer it is in virtue of facts about conventions that we participate in as language users that our utterances mean what they do (see Gr'ice 1957, Lewis 1969, 1983, Schiffer 1972, 1982). This (...) view currently enjoys widespread acceptance among philosophers of mind and language. Though most are not particularly interested in the details of such programs, the dominant view seems to be that something of the sort proposed by Grice, Lewis and Schiffer is basically right. Thus, Jerry Fodor, refiecting what I take to be prevalent attitudes in the field, writes. (shrink)

Thesis: Art like science radically affects our perceiving and thinking, and the two are substantially alike in that together--along with an inherited "natural" language system with which they overlap--they enable us to articulate the world. Science has been advanced as the measure of all things: scientific realism. By implication, art pertains to beauty, science truth. Science effects conceptual break-throughs, changes our models of natural order. On the contrary (I argue), as a nonverbal symbol system art similarly affects paradigm-induced expectations. Substantively (...) there is no difference in the way each enables us to articulate or measure the world: symbolic realism. The myth of resemblance as a criterion of representation--imitation as a one-one relation--has, at least since the time of Plato, obscured this truth. Once the distinction between representational and nonrepresentational art falls, the true nature of artist (like scientist) as maker is illumined. The artist, the scientist (disciplinarian), the cosmologist (those responsible for the formulation of so-called natural languages--in time all of us) make the world or, what practically amounts to the same thing, the known, perceived world. This is the claim of the symbolic realist. Is symbolic realism itself only a watershed? What implication does this critique have for assessing the role of the philosopher today? (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore the dispute between foundationalism and coherentism and attempt a resolution. I will begin by considering the origin of the issue in the famous epistemic regress problem. Next I will explore the central foundationalist idea and the most central objections that have been raised against foundationalist views. This will lead to a consideration of the main contours of the coherentist alternative, and eventually to a discussion of objections to coherentism – including several specific (...) ones that I now judge to be clearly fatal, especially when taken together. This will motivate, finally, a reconsideration of foundationalism. I will argue that the dialectically most serious objection to foundationalism can be successfully answered. While the answer that I will suggest admittedly carries with it the price of aggravating certain other difficulties, especially the venerable problem of showing how belief in an external world of physical objects can be justified, it still seems to me to leave foundationalism as by far the more defensible and promising of the two alternatives. (shrink)

John Searle has recently developed a theory of reasons for acting that intends to rescue the freedom of the will, endangered by causal determinism, whether physical or psychological. To achieve this purpose, Searle postulates a series of “gaps” that are supposed toendowthe self with free will. Reviewing key steps in Searle's argument, this article shows that such an undertaking cannot be successfully completed because of its solipsist premises. The author argues that reasons for acting do not have a subjective, I-ontology (...) but a first-person plural, Weontology that better accounts for agency and responsibility. (shrink)

Speciesism is the wrong of not acknowledging the moral qualities that non-human animals possess that are similar or equivalent or even superior to the moral qualities that human beings possess. However, since it is manifestly clear that no one thinks that apes are in any way obligated to human beings, it clearly cannot be a form of speciesism to be mindful of the differences on the basis of which that is so. In opposition to the advocates of the Great Ape (...) Project, my aim in this essay is to establish the quite minimal claim that apes should not have the same moral status as human beings because human beings have a far greater capacity for moral responsibility than do apes. The claim that I wish to establish is quite compatible with the claim that apes should be treated in a much more morally wholesome manner. (shrink)

Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth Century Thailand. Kamala Tiyavanich. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu 1997, xxi, 410 pp. Cloth, $49.00; pbk, $29.95, £24.95. ISBN 0-8248-1768-0/1781-8.

Research to improve the health of pregnant and fetal patients presents ethical challenges to clinical investigators, institutional review boards, funding agencies, and data safety and monitoring boards. The Common Rule sets out requirements that such research must satisfy but no ethical framework to guide their application. We provide such an ethical framework, based on the ethical concept of the fetus as a patient. We offer criteria for innovation and for Phase I and II and then for Phase III clinical trials (...) to improve the health of pregnant patients and of fetal patients and also criteria to responsibly manage the transition from investigation to clinical practice. Basing ethical criteria for research involving pregnant women on the ethical concept of the fetus as a patient insulates the proposed ethical framework and therefore research on pregnant women from the divisive and politicized concepts and discourses of personhood, fetal rights, and unborn child. (shrink)

This paper examines today's received scientific medical model with respect to its ability to satisfy two conditions: (1) its explanatory adequacy relative to the full range of findings in the medical literature, including those indicating a correlation between psychosocial variables and disease susceptibility; and (2) the fit between its physicalist patient and disease concepts and what today's basic sciences, so-called sciences of complexity, tell us about the way matter, notably complex systems (e.g. patients), behave and the nature of scientific explanation. (...) I conclude that the received (biomedical) model falls short on both counts and to satisfy these conditions is to articulate a formal successor model. This successor must be guided by premises consistent with the findings and methods of today's basic sciences on which an applied science like medicine depends for its validity. Additionally, the successor model must be able to explain (and predict) the full range of clinical findings, both those that its predecessors explains and at least some of those that it does not. The aim of the paper is to identify such a model. (shrink)

IS THE RELATION between the descriptive dimension of ordinary language and the world it purportedly describes better depicted as one-one or many-one? Does the one represent a necessary and sufficient linguistic condition for the other, or a sufficient linguistic condition alone? One difficulty with the "one-one" relational view is that it rules out the possibility of affirming that ordinary language evolves correlatively with an ongoing recasting of our knowledge of the world and that no ordinary proposition is in principle immune (...) to this process. By contrast, the "many-one" view logically allows for this possibility. Positively, on the latter showing, science is seen, in the final analysis, as a governor of our common sense judgments: science is but common sense gone systematic. This is the position that I wish to defend. In recent years another position, one recalling the "one-one" or Aristotelian view, has gained renewed momentum. It derives support from the movements of both phenomenology and ordinary language analysis. There is an assumption about "the given" in each of these movements, and it is to this assumption that I wish now to turn. (shrink)

In virtue of what do the utterances we make mean what they do? What facts about these signs, about us, and about our environment make it the case that they have the meanings they do? According to a tradition stemming from H.P. Grice through David Lewis and Stephen Schiffer it is in virtue of facts about conventions that we participate in as language users that our utterances mean what they do (see Gr'ice 1957, Lewis 1969, 1983, Schiffer 1972, 1982). This (...) view currently enjoys widespread acceptance among philosophers of mind and language. Though most are not particularly interested in the details of such programs, the dominant view seems to be that something of the sort proposed by Grice, Lewis and Schiffer is basically right. Thus, Jerry Fodor, refiecting what I take to be prevalent attitudes in the field, writes. (shrink)

Bioethics has a founding story in which medical paternalism, the interference with the autonomy of patients for their own clinical benefit, was an accepted ethical norm in the history of Western medical ethics and was widespread in clinical practice until bioethics changed the ethical norms and practice of medicine. In this paper I show that the founding story of bioethics misreads major texts in the history of Western medical ethics. I also show that a major source for empirical claims about (...) the widespread practice of medical paternalism has been misread. I then show that that bioethics based on its founding story deprofessionalizes medical ethics. The result leaves the sick exposed to the predatory power of medical practitioners and healthcare organizations with only their autonomy-based rights to non-interference, expressed in contracts, to protect them. The sick are stripped of the protection afforded by a professional, fiduciary relationship of physicians to their patients. Bioethics based on its founding story reverts to the older model of a contractual relationship between the sick and medical practitioners not worthy of intellectual or moral trust (because such trust cannot be generated by what I call ‘deprofessionalizing bioethics’). On closer examination, bioethics based on its founding story, ironically, eliminates paternalism as a moral category in bioethics, thus causing bioethics to collapse on itself because it denies one of the necessary conditions for medical paternalism. Bioethics based on its founding story should be abandoned. (shrink)

The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions—and snares—of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le Guin's novel. Among the topics covered in this wide-ranging, (...) international and interdisciplinary collection are the anarchist, ecological, post-consumerist, temporal, revolutionary, and open-ended utopian politics of The Dispossessed. The book concludes with an essay by Le Guin written specially for this volume, in which she reassesses the novel in light of the development of her own thinking over the past 30 years. (shrink)

What makes words law? -- How law grows up in a group -- The invention of "because I said so" -- The empty idea of authority -- Ideas that endure -- When should we do what law signals? -- How law works -- Evolution and revolution -- Reading to understand each other -- The life of the law.

Lepore and Stone seek to replace the rationality-based Gricean picture of coordination between speaker and hearer with one leaning more strongly on the roles of convention and speaker knowledge while doing away with conversational implicature. Focusing on the phenomena of indirect speech acts, asymmetric conjunction, and scalar inferencing, I argue that the case for abandoning implicature as an analytical tool is not ultimately compelling. I seek further to demonstrate the utility of the classical Gricean distinction between what is said and (...) what is implicated in the construction of an intuitively appealing approach to the perennial question of how to distinguish lying from misleading inside and outside the legal domain. (shrink)

Research to improve the health of pregnant and fetal patients presents ethical challenges to clinical investigators, institutional review boards, funding agencies, and data safety and monitoring boards. The Common Rule sets out requirements that such research must satisfy but no ethical framework to guide their application. We provide such an ethical framework, based on the ethical concept of the fetus as a patient. We offer criteria for innovation and for Phase I and II and then for Phase III clinical trials (...) to improve the health of pregnant patients and of fetal patients and also criteria to responsibly manage the transition from investigation to clinical practice. Basing ethical criteria for research involving pregnant women on the ethical concept of the fetus as a patient insulates the proposed ethical framework and therefore research on pregnant women from the divisive and politicized concepts and discourses of personhood, fetal rights, and unborn child. (shrink)

The basic premise of today's scientific medicine is that the ‘book of man’ is written in the language of the biological sciences, ultimately molecular genetics and biochemistry. The patient is a complex biological organism and disease is a deviation from the norm of somatic parameters. At the same time, many major contemporary diseases are reported to have psychosocial and environmental components in their etiology. Hence the challenge: how can a medical model be both scientific and conceptually well-suited to today's disease (...) burden? I argue that certain contemporary "postmodern" sciences support alternative, non-reductionist (self-organizational) premises. So doing, they offer an infrastructure for a medical model at once scientific and responsive to the diseases at hand. Keywords: biomedicine (biological medicine), natural science paradigm, Cartesian dualism, self-organization, postmodern sciences, self-referentiality CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

BackgroundGiven that advances in research continuously raise new ethical issues, a multidisciplinary working group of investigators involved in biomedical research has gathered to discuss and compare ethical viewpoints in their daily practice.MethodsThe working group has drafted a Charter for Ethics in Biomedical Research that encompasses all the steps in the research process, i.e. from the initial idea to analysis and publication of the results.ResultsBased on key principles for ethically responsible research, the Charter may serve as a tool for performing research, (...) discussing research issues and training researchers.ConclusionsThe Charter should stimulate researchers to think about their responsibility for research in a progressive, caring society. (shrink)

For familiar reasons, stereotyping is believed to be irresponsible and offensive. Yet the use of stereotypes in humor is widespread. Particularly offensive are thought to be sexual and racial stereotypes, yet it is just these that figure particularly prominently in jokes. In certain circumstances it is unquestionably wrong to make jokes that employ such stereotypes. Some writers have made the much stronger claim that in all circumstances it is wrong to find such jokes funny; in other words that people who (...) laugh at such jokes betray sexist/racist attitudes. This conclusion seems false. There is, as I shall argue, a thin dividing line between being properly sensitive to the rights and feelings of women and of racial groups different from our own, and being excessively sensitive to oversensitivity. Oversensitivity is, in this context, a kind of intolerance, and there is no reason why we should pander to that. One can be opposed to the unchecked dissemination of certain kinds of racist or sexist humor without oneself being a racist or sexist for finding such humor funny. The use of various stereotypes in humor serves the linguistic purpose of facilitating brevity and punch, the cultural purpose of preserving, in a sanitized form traditional rivalries and antipathies, and the psychological purpose of discharging fears. Blanket moral condemnation is inappropriate, though there will, of course, be circumstances under which the promulgation of certain types of humor, or even its enjoyment, ought to be condemned. (shrink)

: In this paper, I investigate Leibniz's conception of final causation. I focus especially on the role that Leibnizian final causes play in intentional action, and I argue that for Leibniz, final causes are a species of efficient causation. It is the intentional nature of final causation that distinguishes it from mechanical efficient causation. I conclude by highlighting some of the implications of Leibniz's conception of final causation for his views on human freedom, and on the unconscious activity of substances.

Jacques Derrida's face appeared prominently on the covers of his books as well as inside them, on posters for his public lectures, on drawings and lithographs. Derrida was also a film star whose face appeared on screen, demonstrated by the fact that at least three films depict him in some depth and reveal his talents and charisma as a performer. In the first of these, in chronological order, Ghost Dance, directed by Ken McMullen in 1983, Derrida, playing himself, is asked (...) whether he believes in ghosts and replies with a smile: ?that's a hard question because you see I am a ghost.? ?The cinema is the art of invoking ghosts,? he declares and then proceeds to explain that film is always a mise-en-scène of ghosts who send us to an invisible beyond. ?A ghost is a trace that signals in advance the presence of its absence.? This is a structure the film borrows from Sioux attempts to establish a relation with ancestors, to let their history haunt them, to make the past a living future. For Derrida, the figure of the ghost was to resurface ? perhaps we should say return ? with Specters of Marx (1993). This essay will be a ghost dance that attempts to argue that Jacques Derrida is not only a revenant (a returner) but also an arrivant, one who arrives. (shrink)

The contributors examine the practice of psychotherapy in terms of the idea of tradition, asking the question When working with patients in whose name do I speak? The implications of such questions are fully discussed.

In this article I explore the contemporary relationship of theology to philosophy through the call for a `renewed philosophy of being' by Pope John Paul II. I argue that in fact three understandings of being appear in this call: the first, phenomenological, appears as the bringing to description of the situation of contemporary nihilism, exemplified by Nietzsche both in his published works and his Nachlaß; the second, metaphysical, can be understood as the moralistic voice taken up by contemporary theologians in (...) addressing philosophy. This voice, I argue, is the voicing of the subjectivity of the (Cartesian) subject, and can be understood as the unfolding of the being-historical of the subject, explained in Martin Heidegger's use of the term `history of being' or Seinsgeschichte . This voice arises out of the `modernity' of the eighteenth century up to the present: it is a voice of extreme nihilism, but expressing itself as an imperative — not what `is', but what `should be'. This voice is also to be found in John Paul II. The third understanding is a possibility only arising out of the extreme nihilism encountered in the first two understandings of being. This understanding makes possible the genuine asking of the `question of being', the Seinsfrage, also laid out by Heidegger. As such, the question of being, when genuinely asked, alters the human comportment to God. Inasmuch as being presses in on man through a lack, an emptiness, that reasserts the fundamental orientation toward the future that unfolds from out of the being of beings, so the region of concealment and the withdrawal of the nihilating of the nothing, which is the region proper to divinity, can be understood and seen all over again. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonizing MemoryLaurence J. Kirmayer*, MD (bio)In this far-reaching essay, Emily Walsh explores the significance of memory for coming to grips with the enduring legacy of colonialism in psychiatry. She argues that "for reasons of self-preservation, racialized individuals should reject collective memories underwritten by colonialism." Psychiatry can enable this process or collude with the structures of domination to silence and disable those who bear the brunt of the colonialist history (...) of violence and its current global incarnations. In this brief commentary, I want to underscore the importance of Walsh's argument, link it to contemporary work in cognitive and social science on the dynamics of memory, and point to some resources for implementing these insights in health services and clinical practice.Memory as Psychological Process, Social Practice and Cultural InstitutionMemory is not simply an individual psychological process of accessing images, stories, and knowledge of the past, but a reconstructive process of building a narrative (Kirmayer, 1996). This narrative is profoundly shaped by available templates, metaphors and models that are provided by the tacit, normative and official histories of society (Hirst, Yamashiro & Coman, 2018). But memory is also shaped by cultural affordances that guide attention and by narrative practices, which depend on other people (Ramstead, Veissière, & Kirmayer, 2017). In effect, remembering is not a matter of reaching down into one's memory archive or sedimented experience, but an embodied and enactive process of thinking with and through others (Laanes & Meretoja, 2021; Veissière, Constant, Ramstead, Friston, & Kirmayer, 2020). Memory then depends on community and on a shared understanding of history and of possible futures through which one can anchor and elaborate one's individual story.A direct consequence is that disconnecting a person from others, disembedding them from their social milieu, will lead to disruptions in memory and in the continuity of self. When the environment is toxic, this severance may sometimes be (partly) beneficial—but it always comes at a cost. Figuring out those costs, making them explicit, and ensuring that those whose history is being suppressed or overwritten by others have a chance to reclaim and write their own, is an ethical and pragmatic imperative.The denial of vital memories (recent or remote, personal or collective) causes fractures in the self that may disorganize the individual, install false consciousness, and cement the exclusionary and disvalued position of colonized, racialized, and [End Page 243] marginalized subjects. This process is not only—or even primarily—about memory. It is part of the structure of everyday life, inscribed in institutions and practices where colonial histories, racism, and economic exploitation are deeply entangled. Representations of the past are part of the way we construe the present and anticipate the future—but not every interpretive frame is a memory; there are structures in and of the moment that condition how we think about ourselves in health and illness and these too convey interests and biases disguised as "just the way things are."Fanon's Politics of Postcolonial Memory and IdentityWalsh offers a reading of aspects of Fanon's philosophy to reveal the workings of colonialism in and through memory. She is concerned with specific subsets of collective memories that are affectively charged and related to the identity of a group (Wertsch & Roediger, 2008). These memories are collective not simply they are shared by or distributed among the members of a group but because they define or constitute the collective itself.History is written largely by the powerful who create dominant or 'master' narratives that serve their own projects of legitimation and self-mystification (Trouillot, 2015; Lindqvist, 2021). But the creation of dominant narratives is not solely the province of those in power. There are many kinds of self-serving collective memory (Baumeister & Hastings, 2013)—from those related to the creation of nation states, which may ignore not only colonized peoples, but all ethnicities, religions or linguistic groups subordinated to the ideals of the dominant group (Anderson, 2006; Gunew, 2013; van Alphen & Carretero, 2015), to other forms of collective identity, even to those created by liberatory movements. These are maintained by institutionalization, ceremonial repetition and reenactment... (shrink)

Leibniz's earliest philosophy and its importance for his mature philosophy have not been examined in detail, particularly in the level of detail that one can achieve by placing Leibniz's philosophy in the context of the sources for two of the most basic concerns of his philosophical career: his metaphysics of individuals and the principle oftheir individuation. In this book I provide for the first time a detailed examination of these two Leibnizian themes and trace its implications for how we should (...) interpret other major Leibnizian themes and for how we should read Leibniz and other philosophers of the sixteenth and later centuries as 'modem' philosophers. Leibniz began his philosophical career more than 300 years ago, a fact that shapes fundamentally my attempt in the pages that follow to come to terms now with the texts that he left us. Leibniz's did not do philosophy in a way wholly congenial to twentieth century philosophical methodologies, especially those that have enjoyed some prominence in recent Anglo-American philosophy. Moreover, as we shall see, Leibniz is not a modem philosopher, when 'modem' is understood to mean making a sharp break with medieval philosophy. Indeed, I shall argue, scholars should discard such terms as 'modem' from historical philosophical scholarship, so that old texts can be allowed to remain old - to stand on their own in and from times now long past. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe develops a non-psychologistic account of intentional individual action. According to her, action is intentional when it is subject to a special sense of the question “Why?”, the answer to which displays certain forms of explanation that are available to the agent. In this paper, I present an Anscombean account of collective action. On this account, an action is collective if it is subject to a certain sense of the question why, and displays a form different from, but related (...) to, that of individual action. In particular, agents act together on my account if and only if their actions can all be straightforwardly instrumentally rationalized by the same action. Since an Anscombean account is non-psychologistic in that it does not presuppose that actions are intentional in virtue of being caused by a mental state, my account dissolves most worries about group minds. If I am right, such concerns arise from a bad picture of individual action that poses special problems when carried over to the collective case. (shrink)

Boyle prefaced his Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things with the claim that there are three dangerous consequences for failing to engage in the pursuit of final causes. Boyle was sincere in this claim, for there is a systematic line of reasoning in his texts that incorporates all three consequences and establishes conceptual connections between his science, his theology, and his value theory. I argue in this paper that Boyle's teleological outlook led him to believe that the natural (...) philosopher is morally obligated to continue his investigations of nature on the grounds that a deeper understanding of the teleological order necessarily motivates divine worship. Moreover, Boyle saw a conceptual connection between a teleological study of nature and revealed theology, a connection that reveals that a study of teleological nature can lead to the highest form of happiness. I conclude with a summary, and some remarks about the sincerity and weaknesses of Boyle's reasoning. (shrink)

Chapter I The Legacy of the Sixties Throughout the past two decades Christian theology has been passing through a state of ferment which shows few signs of ...

Some of the authors of the essays on Chinese philosophers prefer the pin yin system of romanization for Chinese names and words, while others prefer the Wade‐Giles system. Given that both systems are in wide use today, important names and words are given in both their pin yin and Wade‐Giles formulations. The author's preference is printed first, followed by the alternative romanization within brackets.