In a recent series of papers, Matthias Steup has defended doxastic voluntarism against longstanding objections. Many of his arguments center on the following conditional: if we accept a compatibilist notion of voluntary control, then, in most instances, belief-formation is voluntary and doxastic voluntarism the correct view. Steup defends two versions of this conditional. The first is universal, moving from compatibilism considered generally to doxastic voluntarism: if compatibilism is true, then doxastic voluntarism is true. The second is more particular, moving from (...) the specific form of reasons-responsive compatibilism to doxastic voluntarism: if reasons-responsive compatibilism is true, then doxastic voluntarism is true. I argue that Steup’s arguments for both conditionals fail, in which case we lack reason to believe in either of them. In the final section of the paper, I argue that the impossibility of epistemic akrasia provides prima facie reason to think the latter conditional is false. (shrink)

Socializing Metaphysics supplies diverse answers to the basic questions of social metaphysics, from a broad array of voices. It will interest all philosophers and social scientists concerned with mind, action, or the foundations of social theory.

This book argues that a radical political gesture can be found in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings. The chapters navigate an interdisciplinary landscape by placing Kierkegaard’s passionate thought in conversation with the writings of Georg Lukács, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. At the heart of the book’s argument is the concept of “indirect politics,” which names a negative space between methods, concepts, and intellectual acts in the work of Kierkegaard, as well as marking the dynamic relations between Kierkegaard and (...) the aforementioned thinkers. Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is a set of masks that displaces identities from one field to the next: theology masks politics; law masks theology; political theory masks philosophy; and psychology masks literary approaches to truth. As reflected in Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, this book examines how Kierkegaard’s indirect politics sets into relief three significant motifs: intellectual non-conformism, indirect communication in and through ambiguous identities, and negative dialectics. Bartholomew Ryan is currently a postdoctoral fellow (2011- ) at the Instituto de Filosofia da Nova, New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He holds degrees from Aarhus University, Denmark (PhD), University College, Dublin (MA), and Trinity College, Dublin (1999). He was visiting lecturer at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin (2007-2011) and Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford (2010), and was a guest scholar at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre in Copenhagen (2007 and 2005) and Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, Minnesota (2005). He has written extensively on Kierkegaard, and also published articles on Nietzsche, Pessoa, Joyce, Shakespeare and Schmitt. (shrink)

Moral Repair examines the ethics and moral psychology of responses to wrongdoing. Explaining the emotional bonds and normative expectations that keep human beings responsive to moral standards and responsible to each other, Margaret Urban Walker uses realistic examples of both personal betrayal and political violence to analyze how moral bonds are damaged by serious wrongs and what must be done to repair the damage. Focusing on victims of wrong, their right to validation, and their sense of justice, Walker presents (...) a unified and detailed philosophical account of hope, trust, resentment, forgiveness, and making amends - the emotions and practices that sustain moral relations. Moral Repair joins a multidisciplinary literature concerned with transitional and restorative justice, reparations, and restoring individual dignity and mutual trust in the wake of serious wrongs. (shrink)

This chapter sets out to distinguish the sorts of claims have been advanced under the rubric of “moral particularism,” and to sort through the insights and costs of each. In particular, it distinguishes those who are animated by suspicion of theory itself from those who aim to reconfigure — sometimes radically — the nature of theory. It defends as key the particularist insight that exceptions to substantive moral explanations are ubiquitous. It argues that the lesson of this insight is not (...) to abandon moral generalizations, but to change the picture of what they must look like to do their work. (shrink)

Many contexts shape and limit moral thinking in philosophy and life. Human conditions of vulnerability and interdependency, of limited awareness and control, of imperfect insight into ourselves and others are inevitable contexts that neither moral thought nor theory should forget. To be truly reflective, moral thinking and moral philosophy must become aware of the contexts that bind our thinking about how to live. This collection of essays by Margaret Urban Walker seek to show how to do this, and why (...) it makes a difference. Contingent and changeable contexts that shape moral thinking include our individual histories, our social positions, and institutional roles, relationships, cultural settings, and social arrangements, and the specific moral idioms we pick up along the way. The paradigms and specialized language of ethical theory are contexts, too; they shape how moral theory looks and what or whom it looks at. Ethical theory and practice are meaningless without these Moral Contexts. (shrink)

For those open to the possibility that philosophical thought can improve life, David Hume's Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary have something to say. In the first comprehensive study of the Essays, Margaret Watkins engages closely with these neglected texts and shows how they provide important insights into Hume's perspective on the breadth and depth of human life, arguing that the Essays reveal his continued commitment to philosophy as a discipline that can promote both social and individual progress. Addressing topics (...) such as politics, war, slavery, the priesthood, the development of industry, aesthetics, emotional disorders, egoism, friendship, sexuality, gender relations, and the nature of philosophy itself, the volume examines Hume's purposes and aims against the backdrop of the eighteenth century society in which he lived. It will be of interest to scholars of modern thought in philosophy, politics, history, and economics. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Am I My Parents' Keeper? An Essay on Justice Between the Young and Old. By Norman Daniels.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:7 Franciscan Studies 62 (2004) THE FRANCISCAN INSTITUTE HONORS GIOVANNI MICCOLI On July 16, 2004 Professor Giovanni Miccoli, a respected scholar of medieval, Church and Franciscan history, received the Franciscan Institute Medal from St. Bonaventure University during its celebration of the Feast of St. Bonaventure. University president Sr. Margaret Carney, O.S.F., and Fr. Michael Cusato, O.F.M., director of The Franciscan Institute and dean of the School of Franciscan (...) Studies, presented the medal during an Academic Convocation at 7 p.m. in The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. A reception followed in the Dresser-Rand Atrium. During the Convocation, Giovanni Miccoli gave a presentation, “A Reading of the Christian Proposal of Francis According to His First Biographers,” continuing a longtime focus on the study of Francis of Assisi and his contributions to the Church. Professor Miccoli, who was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1933, studied in Pisa at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Università, in Munich at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and London at the Warburg Institute. He has taught in Pisa, Venice and his native Trieste, where he is now a professor emeritus at the Università di Trieste. A historian of the Middle Ages and of the Roman Catholic Church, he has combined those loves to specialize first in the Gregorian Reformation, reforms undertaken within the Church under Pope Gregory VII at the end of the 11th century. Turning his eyes to more modern times, he is also an expert on the relationship between the Catholic Church and Fascism in Italy, including the questions related to Pius XII’s pontificate during World War II. His study of the Church in Italy during the Middle Ages led to a focus on Francis of Assisi and his impact on the Church, which led to his becoming one of foremost Franciscan scholars of modern times. Miccoli is particularly known for his contribution to 1974’s “La Storia Religiosa” (Religious History of Italy), which is the second volume of “Storia d’Italia” (History of Italy). In “La Storia Religiosa” he examined how Francis and his movement influenced the history and development of the Church in Italy. 8 GIOVANNI MICCOLI Since that time, he has published several major articles on Franciscan issues, largely drawing from early Franciscan documents and sources, which have been translated from Italian to English and published in Greyfriars Review, a publication of the Franciscan Institute. One essay, “Francis of Assisi’s Christian Proposal,” was published in Italian in 1983 and in Greyfriars Review in 1989; another, “A Christian Experience Between Gospel and Institution,” appeared in Italian in 1992 and in Greyfriars Review in 1997; while a third, “The Writings of Francis,” was published in Italian in 1997 and in Greyfriars Review in 2001. The Franciscan Institute established the medal in 1987 to honor scholars who have made outstanding contributions to Franciscan studies in the areas of philosophy, theology, history and spirituality. Giovanni Miccoli was the 16th recipient of the medal. Recent honorees have included Fr. Clément Schmitt, O.F.M., Sr. Ingrid Peterson, O.S.F., Fr. Kenan Osborne, O.F.M., and Fr. Zachary Hayes, O.F.M. THE FRANCISCAN PROPOSAL OF GIOVANNI MICCOLI Giovanni Miccoli was born a little more than seventy years ago in the city of Trieste in northern Italy. He studied at the Scuola normale superiore of Pisa, the most prestigious school in Italy, where he was taught by renowned professors, particularly Arsenio Frugoni. He also received scholarships to study in Munich, Germany, and in London, England. Although he was offered a wide variety of important research and teaching positions in the major cities of Italy, he chose scholarly authority over academic power, and decided to return to his home town and join the university of Trieste, where he taught until his recent appointment as professor emeritus. Trieste is a city at the crossroads of the Latin, Germanic and Slavic worlds. Although largely ignored nowadays, in the past it was the harbor of Austria and, more recently during the Cold War, the last city of Western Europe facing the communist world. It is an enigmatic, fascinating city. This evening we honor Giovanni Miccoli as one of the greatest... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction by Mark PayneAihua ChenFlowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction, by Mark Payne; 192 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.Mark Payne's Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction contributes significantly to the nascent scholarship on the ever-increasing corpus of postapocalyptic fiction by reading this genre philosophically and interrogating how it imagines new forms of life beyond the confines of a particular kind of world (...) and outside the polis walls. Payne's claim is that postapocalyptic fiction is "political theory in fiction form" and "shows what it would be like to live that life" (p. 2). Moreover, he posits that postapocalyptic fiction "imagines forms of human freedom, sociality, and capability outside the discourse of normative theory" (pp. 2–3). This monograph, framed by the great thinkers such as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and many others, provides a cogent and incisive analysis of the themes of occupation, ontology, and the anthropological horizon in postapocalyptic fiction. It offers a comprehensive study of the genre, ranging in the context of philosophical and political ideas from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy. The readings include a well-developed introduction, three analytical chapters, and a conclusion.In his extensive introduction, Payne provides a rich background for his study of postapocalyptic fiction and perspicuously outlines his theoretical framework and research scope. Payne first traces the literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction to the biblical tale of Noah, and Hesiod's Works and Days. He offers a helpful delineation of the salient differences between apocalyptic fiction and postapocalyptic fiction, and thus narrows his research scope to postapocalyptic fictions that commit themselves to "staging human beings living on after the catastrophe, and to showing why catastrophe is necessary for the new forms of human sociality they envision" (p. 18), which accounts for his omission of some famous postapocalyptic novels, such as Will Self's The Book of Dave and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.After acknowledging his indebtedness to earlier research, Payne argues that although some critical readings of postapocalyptic fiction "have rightly identified its commitment to starting over, they have generally mischaracterized it by beginning at the macrosocial level, with the social contract and other large-scale forms of social organization, rather than the single human being and their body." He further suggests that "postapocalyptic fiction advances a strand of political thought that is as ancient as Aristotle's student Dicaearchus, who argued, against his teacher, that the polis is not the best form of life for the realization of human potential" (p. 21).Therefore, his research addresses this gap by focusing on individualism, small-scale sociality, and forms of freedom and regeneration outside the polis wall. Payne points out that "the form of freedom staged in postapocalyptic fiction is [End Page 499] marronage" (p. 26). Especially noteworthy is that Payne gives a detailed explication of the theory of marronage, the relationship between occupation and mentation to which he frequently refers in subsequent chapters to expound how survivors after the apocalyptic event can adapt themselves to the altered world and have new forms of mental life through their new occupations.The first chapter, "The Apocalyptic Cosmos," examines how cosmic forces transform human beings' physical existence and forms of life in the works of Hesiod, Shelley, and Olaf Stapledon, and how these writers engage with the immediacy of relationship between occupation and mentation. Payne first engages in illuminating exploration of how Shelley draws on Works and Days for her vision of postapocalyptic fiction. He argues that The Last Man looks to Works and Days "for its vision of human victimization at the hands of a whimsical cosmos" (p. 37). For Shelley, primitive agriculture is the ideal form of life, in which "the relationship between occupation and mentation is the most satisfying to human beings because it affords them the idea that personal, small-scale, local divinities care about human beings in the same way that human beings care for them" (p. 44). In the latter part of the chapter, Payne illustrates how Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker reveal... (shrink)

The socialist project is burdened by a history of brutal failures. The authors of the papers collected in this volume are convinced that a democratic and humane socialism is both desirable and possible. They lay out their view of different aspects of this new socialism in this book. Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt are both the editors and contributors to this book. -/- Select chapters translated into Spanish have appeared in a volume in Barcelona, Spain.

There is no good human life outside of a state, and the good state enables us to live well together – so says Constitutivism, the theory developed in this book. Reinvigorating Aristotelian ideas, the author asks in what sense citizens of modern, populous and pluralistic societies share a common good. -/- While we can easily find examples of cooperation that benefit each member, such as insurances, the idea that persons could share a common good became puzzling with modernity – a (...) puzzlement epitomised in Margaret Thatcher’s ‘What is society? There is no such thing!’ Aristotle describes the state as the end of human development, both chronologically and normatively, but modern philosophers, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, conceive the relation between state and citizen as instrumental. Either the state is a means of advancing each member’s individual good or the individual is a means of advancing some collective good. From both perspectives, the Aristotelian idea that human individuals somehow realise their own good in realising some communal good appears metaphysically puzzling, even nonsensical. -/- This puzzlement, the author argues, results from our profoundly modern understanding of rational actions, which we generally see as means toward outcomes. If we allow that not only outcomes but also histories and identities can be good reasons for actions, then it makes sense to see a person’s good and the common good of their political community as constitutive of one another, as Aristotle thought. Building on this idea, the author argues that individual actions and lives exist only in conjunction with a political community. In designing our institutions, we hence also give ourselves an identity and, in that sense, constitute ourselves as persons. Her arguments shed new light on a range of traditional topics of political theory, such as the justification of state authority or the question of how to justify or challenge the design of social institutions. (shrink)

Women have been stigmatized in androrentric psychology by a deficiency model and in patriarchal theology by a domination model. Neither health nor whoIeness has been available to women in these frameworks. Feminist liberation theologians have posited alternative views of the human which take women’s experience seriously. Similarly, the “self-in-relation” approach to women’s development being proposed by feminist psychotherapists centers on women’s experience as normative for women. These two discussions of what it means to be a female converge in many dimensions. (...) One such convergence, a growth-enhancing relationship, is explored in some depth for its applicability to a feminist pastoral counseling. (shrink)

This book is an original critique of contemporary liberal theories of justice, focusing on the problem of how to relate the personal point of view of the individual to the impartial perspective of justice. Margaret Moore's examination of prominent contemporary arguments for liberal justice reveals that individualist theories are subject to two serious difficulties: the motivation problem and the integrity problem. Individualists cannot explain why the individual should be motivated to act in accordance with the dictates of liberal justice, (...) andDSrelated to thisDSoffer radically incoherent accounts of the person. Revisionist liberal attempts to ground liberalism in contextual and perfectionist terms offer more defensible foundations, but Dr Moore argues that such theories do not support liberal political principles. She concludes by sketching a historical and concrete approach to political and ethical theorizing which reformulates the relation between self-interest and morality, and is not subject to the problems that beset liberal individualist theories of justice. Her book advances the debate between communitarians and liberals about the kind of moral foundation which a liberal society requires. (shrink)

Fog in August is a German film based on Robert Domes' historical novel of the same name. The film provides a fictionalized account of the institutionalization and eventual killing of children and adults labelled as a burden on the State and unworthy of life. On one level, this is a story of good versus evil, where innocent patients are manipulated by callous doctors and nurses. At a deeper level, however, it is possible to read the characters as more complex and (...) such a reading gives an insight into the paradox of how a genocidal policy was able to be systematically implemented by health care professionals who had previously taken an oath to provide care to all people. Carl Jung argued that powerful stories, told across generations, contain mythical archetypes that help drive the plot and convey beliefs about humanity. The aims of this paper are to explore Jungian ideas within Fog in August that help the historical story it is based on resonate with viewers today, and demonstrate how the application of these insights can help health care professionals more fully understand morally distressing events and, as a result, support and improve the safety of patients. (shrink)

Working the night shift can be fraught and experienced as demanding and, yet, is often dismissed as babysitting. Few researchers have explored the social and cultural meanings of night nursing, including storytelling rituals. In 2019, a narrative study was undertaken. The aim was to explore the stories recalled by nurses about working night shifts. Thirteen Australian nurses participated. Data were gathered using the Biographical Narrative Interview Method, and narrative analysis produced forty stories and three themes: strange and challenging experiences; colleagues (...) can be mentors (or not); and textbook knowledge is only part of what is needed on night shift. Nursing students who engage with these stories may come to understand the challenges of the night shift, and the valuable work that nurses engage in throughout a 24‐hr period, work that involves adept psychosocial and interpersonal skills alongside technical and physical competence. (shrink)

This essay examines one of the contributions that Sandra Bartky makes to feminist theory. Bartky critiques Foucault for his gender blind treatment of the disciplines and social practices that create "docile bodies." She introduces several gender specific disciplines and practices that illustrate that the production of bodies is itself gender coded. This essay argues that social practices are not monolithic, but are composed of various strands that may be in tension with one another.

Informed by practices of women's activism in India, this book proposes a feminist social justice framework to address the wide range of issues women face globally, including economic exploitation, sexist oppression, racial, ethnic, and caste oppression, and cultural imperialism. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book argues that current frameworks for global justice, such as human rights, need to be supplemented by a relational framework that includes resistance to economic exploitation and social oppression.