This article compares and contrasts the work of Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on power and the State. It argues that despite Skinner's explicit repudiation of Derrida's method of philosophising, he has come to advocate an approach to the history of ideas that bears important and striking similarities to Derrida's thought. I attribute this intellectual gravitation toward Derrida as the logical outcome of a shared understanding on the nature of the cosmos and man's place within it-an understanding profoundly (...) indebted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the genealogical history of Michel Foucault. As a means to illustrate the narrowing intellectual gulf between Skinner and Derrida, I compare their respective thoughts on the nature of the modern and contemporary State, a State that both intellectuals see as emerging from a dominant western philosophical tradition that, at its core, is marked by the idea of fear. For both Skinner and Derrida this has profound consequences for the possibilities open to individuals and societies for free thought and political action. (shrink)

Annabel Brett and James Tully, ed., Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, and D. N. DeLuna, ed., The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J. G. A. Pocock.

Scientific points of view, according to which my existence is a moment of the world's, are always both naive and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted, without explicitly mentioning it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself round me and begins to exist for me.

In Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics, Michael Temelini outlines an innovative new approach to understanding the political implications of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Most political philosophers who have approached Wittgenstein have done so through the idea of therapeutic skepticism, implying politics that privilege conservatism or non-interference. Temelini interprets Wittgenstein differently, emphasizing his view that we come to understand the meanings of words and actions through a dialogue of comparison with other cases. Examining the work of Charles Taylor, Quentin Skinner, (...) and James Tully, Temelini highlights the ways in which all three, despite their differences, share a common debt to that dialogical approach.A cogent explanation of how Wittgenstein’s epistemology and ontology can shed light on political issues and offer a solution to political challenges, Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics highlights the importance of Wittgensteinian thinking in contemporary political science, political theory, and political philosophy. (shrink)

Both as historian and as theoretician, Quentin Skinner has contributed brilliantly to our understanding of the tradition of political thinking and to the renewed interest in a genuinely historical reading of the texts of that tradition. Until now, however, Skinner's methodological articles have not been conveniently available under one cover. James Tully's excellent volume remedies that deficiency. Tully brings together five of Skinner's most important writings on interpretation, his own fine introduction to Skinner's work, seven essays (...) by critics, and a long reply by Skinner, in which he responds to virtually all the criticisms of his work that have appeared in print. No one seriously interested in intellectual history, the history of philosophy, or the history of political thought can afford to miss this book. (shrink)

In the present paper I wish to argue that psychological egoism may well have a basis in the empirical facts of human psychology. Certain contemporary learning theorists, e.g., Hull and Skinner, have put forward behavioristic theories of the origin and functioning of human motives which posit a certain number of basically "selfish, " unlearned primary drives or motives (like hunger, thirst, sleep, elimination, and sex), explain all other, higher-order, drives or motives as derived genetically from the primary ones via (...) certain "laws of reinforcement," and, further, deny the "functional autonomy" of those higher-order drives or motive. Now it is a hotly debated issue in contemporary Learning Theory whether any theory such as we have described briefly above could adequately explain adult human behavior. I shall, however, argue only that a theory of the above kind may well be true, and that from such a theory, fortified only by one additional psychological premise, the truth of egoism (non-altruism) logically follows. I hope to show, thereby, that the question of psychological egoism is still an open empirical issue, however fallacious be the philosophical arguments for it. (shrink)

This article argues for a conception of the history of ideas that treats philosophy historically while avoiding sociological reductionism. On the view presented here, philosophical problems characteristically arise from a conflict of commitments, at least some of which have roots in wider forms of life and ways of seeing the world. In bringing such 'doxa' to our attention, the history of ideas, it is argued, plays a role that is both genuinely historical and, at the same time, contributes to philosophical (...) argument in making these commitments available to scrutiny. The article defends the permissibility of the apparent 'anachronism' involved in such interpretations. Although they may violate the 'principle of attribution' advocated by Quentin Skinner in his seminal 'Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas', that principle should not be accepted. The ascription of authorial intentions does indeed form an important part of interpretation, but intentions should not be understood either in a 'Cartesian' fashion (as recapturing what was 'in the author's mind') or in the modified version of Austinian speech-act theory advocated by Skinner. (shrink)

Scholars studying classic political texts face an important decision: Should these texts be read as artifacts of history or as sources for still-valid insights about politics today? Competing historical and “presentist” approaches to political thought do not have a methodological dispute—that is, a disagreement about the most effective scholarly means to an agreed-upon end. They instead have an ethical dispute about the respective value of competing activities that aim at different purposes. This article examines six ethical arguments, drawn primarily from (...) the work of Quentin Skinner, in favor of the historical approach. It concludes that while both intellectual history and presentist theory are ethically justifiable, the best justification of the former enterprise is that it can help us achieve the purposes of the latter. (shrink)

This collection of essays, all previously published, offers selections from the life work of Robert Nozick. The essays range widely both temporally, from 1969 to 1995, and topically, from an analytic study of coercion to thoughts on Socrates’ profession of ignorance, to short “philosophical fictions.” The themes and approaches will be familiar to those who know anything of Nozick’s work. More than half the book is taken up by formal, analytic studies of topics of social, political, and moral significance. Questions (...) about how we might decide between competing individual preferences, or what strategies of decision making are the most rational and/or effective, or even how we come to judge certain actions immoral, are treated with remarkable precision and the maximum amount of formal, symbolic aid. Indeed, the occasional page packed with little but probability matrices, set theory, and the like makes for slow and somewhat typographically intimidating reading. Yet in Nozick’s hands these tools are well used, and offer to the patient reader both clarity and convincingness to a degree not likely to be available in another format. In fact, I think the formal essays offer the further advantage of being relatively self-contained, and thus fully accessible to anyone with sufficient education to read them. In contrast, some of the less formal work relies on the reader having a great deal of philosophical education and experience. Here to be capable of reading the essay is not sufficient for understanding it; one must also have read a good deal of Quine, and maybe some Hilary Putnam and B. F. Skinner just to be sure. For this reason, the audience for these essays must range, too. I can imagine having great fun reading “Newcomb’s Problem and Two Principles of Choice” with a group of smart undergraduates, and certainly advanced students in the social sciences, with little philosophical training, could profitably work their way through “Coercion” and “Interpersonal Utility Theory,” but most of the book is clearly designed for a rather highly trained philosopher. From this perspective, the chief value of the collection is the convenience of having so much interesting work in one volume. Less book than encyclopedia, it will make a useful reference volume for the serious student of philosophy, a place to turn for guidance in unraveling some of the intricacies of codifying rational principles of choice. (shrink)

This article presents a republican interpretation of Michael Walzer’s theory of distributive justice and of his idea of complex equality. It demonstrates that Spheres of Justice is not only a defense of pluralism and equality, but also of liberty or freedom. Like Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, Walzer understands liberty as non-domination. For Walzer, a just distribution of all social goods leads to a “complex egalitarian society” in which every citizen is equally free from domination and tyranny. Against (...) alternative interpretations, this paper suggests that Walzer is indeed a political egalitarian and that complex equality should be interpreted as a simple equality of liberty or freedom. In the conclusion, the article argues that Walzer’s and Pettit’s versions of republicanism are complementary because they each illuminate the other’s blind spot and thus mutually fix each other’s particular shortcoming. (shrink)

Michael Oakeshott conceives the history of European political thought as a structuring of ideas and arguments of the practical experience aimed to understanding political expressions in vogue in the culture of a people. It is not a continuous and cumulative history of abstract and disembodied ideas, as it is wrongly conceived, but of some men who thought politics in a certain way on the basis of the language and of the set of actions, moral beliefs and contingencies of the (...) people which they belong to. The article highlights the comparison between Oakeshott, Quentin Skinner and Gianfranco Miglio on the search for the most appropriate method to be applied in the study of the history of political thought. (shrink)

This book addresses a question fundamental for Oakeshott throughout his life, which is what we are doing when we read and discuss some memorable work in the history of political thought. The approach the book takes to Oakeshott’s response to this question is of particular interest in that it explores in detail extensive notes he made on the beginnings of political philosophy in ancient Greece in an unpublished set of notebooks in which he recorded his thoughts on many different subjects (...) throughout his life.In addition, the book gives contemporary significance to Oakeshott’s interpretation of the history of political thought by using it to confront a series of contemporary challenges to the study of the history of political thought and to the study of the ‘great books.’ In particular, Oakeshott’s distinction between ‘various kinds or levels of political thought’ is carefully analyzed, as is also the extent of his agreement and disagreement with Quentin Skinner. In the concluding chapter, the author relates Oakeshott’s view of the nature of the history of political thought to his well-known description of philosophy as ‘conversation’, describing it as an introduction to that conversation. (shrink)

The main task for philosophers is introducing, clarifying, articulating, or simply redirecting concepts as—to echo Quine’s poetic formulation— “devices for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” I sometimes use “coining concepts” as shorthand for this task. When the concepts are quantitative they are part of a possible science ; when the concepts are qualitative they can be part of a possible philosophy. Of course, in practice, concepts are oft en stillborn, while others have multiple functions in fi (...) elds of inquiry that may straddle philosophy and science. In this chapter I argue that historians of philosophy must, among other things, coin concepts that disclose the near or distant past and create a shared horizon for our philosophical future. In virtue of our expertise we can often do so by drawing on previously orphaned concepts. The more narrow aim of this paper is to introduce two concepts, “Newton’s challenge to philosophy” and, especially, “philosophic prophecy,” that are suitable to philosophers who engage with texts in a scholarly fashion. I do so by re-telling the story of early analytical philosophy and its connection to the reception of Spinoza. By “Newton’s challenge to philosophy,” I mean the following: from about 1700 onward, “natural science” is increasingly taken to be authoritative in settling debates within philosophy; it is a concept that focuses attention on the authority of science and its various manifestations within philosophy. By “philosophic prophecy,” I mean the structured ways in which concept formation by philosophers can shape possible futures, including that of philosophy. In what follows, I first develop and characterize philosophic prophecy more precisely. In order to illuminate the concept, I contrast it with several related, more familiar concepts. Second, I offer brief critical comments on two alternative approaches to the history of philosophy promoted by Quentin Skinner and Michael Kremer in order to make more precise the approach favored here. Third, I offer a fresh narrative about the prehistory and origin of analytical philosophy. My story focuses on Ernest Nagel, who, I claim, is the philosophic prophet of analytical philosophy. Along the way, I explore the shared origins of analytical philosophy and analytical history of philosophy in the anti-Spinozistic writings of George Boole and Bertrand Russell. I oppose Nagel’s and Russell’s narratives in light of Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle. I adopt Schlick’s bold and unappreciated vision of the task of philosophy in scientific age. I focus on his identification of philosophical legislation with qualitative concepts. (shrink)

First published in 1998, this volume argues that two conditions need to be met for any agreement between people with conflicting desires to count as an unforced one, namely, that the parties argue as if they had equal power and that their antipathy to being coerced exceeds their desire to coerce others. These conditions entail objective moral principles and a theory of justice, modifying and developing Rawls' contractarian theory, but without the veil of ignorance. They support Rawls on basic civil (...) liberties and constitutional liberal democratic government, including religious tolerance, anti-paternalism, anti-racism and anti-sexism, but dispute his Difference Principle, his circumstances of justice, Laws of Peoples, reflective equilibrium, and freedom of conscience as a basic liberty. The book also gives a contractarian account of epistemology, metaethics, education, the rationality of being moral, the rights of animals and other non-persons, and the rights of indigenous peoples. Writers such as Brian Barry, R.S. Peters, Isaiah Berlin, Vinit Haksar, Jurgen Habermas, R.M. Hare, Philip Pettit, Derek Parfit, Michael Smith, Peter Geach, Philippa Foot, Bronwyn Davies, Quentin Skinner and Will Kymlicka are also discussed. (shrink)

Michael Tye untangles the complex web of empirical and conceptual issues of the newly revived imagery debate in psychology between those that liken mental...

The Vocabulary of a Modern European State is the companion volume to The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence and completes the enterprise of gathering together Oakeshott’s previously scattered essays and reviews. As with all the other volumes in the series it contains an entirely new editorial introduction explaining how the writings it contains find their place in his work as a whole. It covers the years 1952 to 1988, the period during which Oakeshott wrote his definitive work, On Human Conduct. (...) The essay from which the volume takes its title was intended as a companion piece to the third part of the latter work, and is just one of over sixty pieces that it includes. The volume draws together critical responses to works by major philosophers, historians, and political theorists of his own generation such as Bertrand de Jouvenel, Herbert Marcuse, and Michael Polanyi as well as to some major figures of current scholarship such as Quentin Skinner and Roger Scruton. (shrink)

"Sovereignty or submission: Restoring national identity in the spirit of liberty," a symposium organized by The New Criterion and the Center for American Greatness, took place on October 16, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Participants were Michael Anton, David Azerrad, Chris Buskirk, Tucker Carlson, Angelo M. Codevilla, John Fonte, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Daniel McCarthy, Balázs Orbán, John O'Sullivan, James Piereson, and Kiron Skinner. Discussion revolved around earlier versions of the essays presented in this book.

"Sovereignty or submission: Restoring national identity in the spirit of liberty," a symposium organized by The New Criterion and the Center for American Greatness, took place on October 16, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Participants were Michael Anton, David Azerrad, Chris Buskirk, Tucker Carlson, Angelo M. Codevilla, John Fonte, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Daniel McCarthy, Balázs Orbán, John O'Sullivan, James Piereson, and Kiron Skinner. Discussion revolved around earlier versions of the essays presented in this book.

Constitutivism is the view that we can derive a substantive account of normative reasons for action—perhaps a Kantian account, perhaps a hedonistic account, perhaps a desire-fulfillment account, this is up for grabs—from abstract premises about the nature of action and agency. Constitutivists are thus bound together by their conviction that such a derivation is possible, not by their agreement about which substantive reasons can be derived, and not by agreement about the features of action and agency that permit the derivation. (...) In the final section of the penultimate chapter of Reasons, a chapter devoted to discussing the merits of constitutivism, Eric Wiland has this to say: Constitutivism is ambitious. It attempts to extract an account of reasons for action from reflection on the bare ideas of action and agency. So we shouldn’t be surprised if doubts remain. Those who claim to extract reasons out of agency might remind us of those who claim to pull rabbits out of hats. you suspect that there must be a trick. (shrink)

This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if (...) we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us. -/- Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others. (shrink)

Inauguration speech at chair number 18 of the Brasilian Academy of Philosophy.

Can we draw substantive conclusions about the reasons for action agents have from premisses about the desires of their idealized counterparts? The answer is that we can. The argument for this conclusion is Rawlsian in spirit, focusing on the choices that our idealized counterparts must make simply in virtue of being ideal, and inferring from these choices the contents of the desires that they must have. It turns out that our idealized counterparts must have desires in which we ourselves figure (...) as both agents and patients, and in which others must figure too, though only as patients. (shrink)

Is Leo Strauss truly an intellectual forebear of neoconservatism and a powerful force in shaping Bush administration foreign policy? _The Truth about Leo Strauss_ puts this question to rest, revealing for the first time how the popular media came to perpetuate an oversimplified view of a complex and wide-ranging philosopher. In doing so, it corrects our perception of Strauss, providing the best general introduction available to the political thought of this misunderstood figure. Catherine and Michael Zuckert—both former students of (...) Strauss—guide readers here to a nuanced understanding of how Strauss’s political thought fits into his broader philosophy. Challenging the ideas that Strauss was an inflexible conservative who followed in the footsteps of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt, the Zuckerts contend that Strauss’s signature idea was the need for a return to the ancients. Through their work, they conclude that Strauss was a sober defender of liberal democracy, aware of both its strengths and its weaknesses. Balanced and accessible, _The Truth about Leo Strauss_ is a must-read for anyone who wants to more fully comprehend this enigmatic philosopher and his much-disputed legacy. “_The Truth about Leo Strauss_ is the most balanced and insightful book yet written about Strauss’s thought, students, and political influence. It dispels myths promulgated by both friends and foes and persuasively traces the conflicting paths that American thinkers indebted to Strauss have taken.”—William Galston, Brookings Institution. (shrink)

The requirements of instrumental rationality are often thought to be normative conditions on choice or intention, but this is a mistake. Instrumental rationality is best understood as a requirement of coherence on an agent's non-instrumental desires and means-end beliefs. Since only a subset of an agent's means-end beliefs concern possible actions, the connection with intention is thus more oblique. This requirement of coherence can be satisfied either locally or more globally, it may be only one among a number of such (...) requirements on an agent's total set of desires and beliefs, and it has no special connection with reasoning. An appreciation of these facts leads to a better understanding of both the nature and the significance of instrumental rationality. (shrink)

Michael J. Almeida presents a bold new defence of the existence of God. He argues that entrenched principles in philosophical theology which have served as basic assumptions in apriori, atheological arguments are in fact philosophical dogmas. Almeida argues that not only are such principles false - they are necessarily false.

Michael Tanner; IX*—Sentimentality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 127–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelia.

Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality is, I think, best understood as an attempt to undermine our allegiance to these two purported constitutive claims about action. If we must think that psychological states figure in the explanation of action then, according to Dancy, we should suppose that those psychological states are beliefs rather than desire-belief pairs. Dancy thus prefers pure cognitivism to Humeanism. But in fact he thinks that we have no business accepting any form of psychologism in the first place; no (...) business accepting a theory that explains an agent’s actions by reference to that agent’s psychological states. For though it is indeed a truism that actions are explained by reasons, Dancy argues that psychological states are only rarely, if ever, reasons. He thus prefers the unadorned normative story, a story which contents itself with explaining actions by laying out the considerations in the light of which the agent acted as he did, to any form of psychologism. I will consider Dancy’s arguments for these claims in turn. (shrink)

Many claim that a plausible moral theory would have to include a principle of beneficence, a principle telling us to produce goods that are both welfarist and agent‐neutral. But when we think carefully about the necessary connection between moral obligations and reasons for action, we see that agents have two reasons for action, and two moral obligations: they must not interfere with any agent's exercise of his rational capacities and they must do what they can to make sure that agents (...) have rational capacities to exercise. According to this distinctively deontological view of morality, though we are obliged to produce goods, the goods in question are non‐welfarist and agent‐relative. The value of welfare thus turns out to be, at best, instrumental. (shrink)

This paper provides a phenomenological exploration of the phenomenon of collective violence, specifically by following the leading clue of war from Plato to the “new wars” of late globalization. It first focuses on the genealogy of the legitimization of collective violence in terms of “counter-violence” and then demonstrates how it is mediated by constructions of “the other” in terms of “violence incarnate.” Finally, it proposes to explore such constructions—including the “barbarian” in Greek antiquity, “the cannibal” in the context of Colonialism, (...) or the contemporary cipher of religious irrationality—as mirror effects of one’s own disavowed forms of violence. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religions is a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the academic study of religions. Written by leading experts in the field, the volume offers an interdisciplinary survey of religious studies. Presented in seven parts, the Handbook examines conceptual issues of religion, theoretical approaches, modes, environments, topics, and an overview of the history of the discipline. Each chapter references at least two different religions, often providing fresh and innovative perspectives on key issues.

Imagine that Bloggs is faced with a choice between giving a benefit to his child, or a slightly greater benefit to a complete stranger. The benefit is whatever the child or the stranger can buy for $100 — Bloggs has $100 to give away — and it just so happens that the stranger would buy something from which he would gain a slightly greater benefit than would Bloggs's child. Let's stipulate that Bloggs believes this to be, and let's stipulate, as (...) well, that he believes that the consequences of his actions are otherwise identical. He chooses to give the benefit to his child. What do we learn about Bloggs from his choice? We learn that Bloggs cares more about his child than he does about complete strangers. Nor is anyone likely to be surprised by this, for it just goes to show that he is much like the rest of us. He gives preferential treatment to his nearest and dearest when he acts, those with whom he has a special relationship, much as we do. (shrink)

Michael Strawser provides a new reading of Spinoza as a philosopher of love for whom the ethically qualified conception of noble love is central. Strawser situates Spinoza’s philosophy of love within the Jewish and Cartesian traditions and shows how this active conception of love can conquer hatred and bring people together.

Neuropsychiatrist Michael T. H. Wong argues that the notions of soul, mind, brain, self and consciousness are no longer adequate on their own to explain humanity. He formulates a “third discourse” that brings philosophy neuroscience theology and psychiatry together as an innovative multilayered narrative for the person in the twenty-first century.