In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Who or What is the Preembryo?S.J. Richard A. McCormick (bio)IntroductionAlthough widely used by scientists, the term "preembryo" has raised some suspicions. Histopathologist Michael Jarmulowicz (1990), for example, asserts that the term was adopted by the American Fertility Society (AFS) and the Voluntary Licensing Authority (VLA) in Britain "as an exercise of linguistic engineering to make human embryo research more palatable to the general public."I cannot speak for the (...) VLA, but I can clarify that this was not the motive of the AFS. As a member of the AFS ethics committee that discussed and adopted this terminology, I know that our discussion was not tied to embryo research or moral issues. The term "preembryo" was adopted because the earliest stages of mammalian development primarily involve establishment of the nonembryonic trophoblast, rather than the formation of the embryo. As Clifford Grobstein (1988, p. 61), a distinguished basic scientist who also sat on the AFS committee notes:The scientific rationale for the term preembryo... is its greater accuracy in characterizing the initial phase of mammalian and human development.... The status implications of such a change in terminology were not at issue in the discussion.This is not to say that the moral status of the preembryo is not a concern worthy of independent consideration. It is an important question with significant practical implications, especially in the context of in vitro fertilization. At stake are issues such as: (1) what may be done to preembryos before transfer; (2) whether all preembryos must be transferred; and (3) what may be done to preembryos that are not transferred (Ethics Committee of the American Fertility Society (AFS) 1986, p. 29S). Furthermore, emergency treatment of rape cases may also depend on such a determination. [End Page 1]Cryopreservation, which entails freezing unused preembryos for possible later use, is one example of a procedure that raises issues associated with the moral status of the preembryo. Cryopreservation decreases the number of stimulated egg recovery cycles a woman must undergo and increases flexibility in transfer protocols. But thawing of the preembryos is not a completely benign process; significant numbers of the preembryos die in the process and injury cannot be excluded.In addition, down the road a year or so lies preimplantation genetic diagnosis, now being tested in several centers of reproductive research. This would involve the removal of one or more cells from a preembryo developing in vitro. The DNA from these cells would be studied and then only genetically normal preembryos would be transferred. With the growth in knowledge about single gene defects and the rapid advance of amplification technology, which allows gene visualization, it is not difficult to imagine scientists embarking on a variety of micromanipulations of the preembryo for the sake of gaining knowledge.Not all research with gametes involves preembryos, but clearly some experiments and procedures await resolution of the moral status of the preembryo. I contend in this paper that the moral status—and specifically the controversial issue of personhood—is related to attainment of developmental individuality (being the source of one individual). This contrasts with the view that holds that personhood occurs earlier, at the point of genetic uniqueness. I believe that an embryo that has developed to the point where it can be one individual and one individual only, differs in moral status from a preembryo that has not, even if in many cases we may choose to treat them similarly.The Scientific UnderpinningsTwo things must be kept in mind—and in a sense, in tension—in turning to science for help in assessing the status of the preembryo. First, science is not competent to decide the question of personhood or ensoulment. As the Catholic document, Declaration on Procured Abortion, which I will return to later, notes: "It is a philosophical problem" (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) 1974, p. 10, endnote 19). On the other hand, another Catholic document, Donum vitae(CDF 1987), notes that the conclusions of science provide a "valuable indication" for reason's deliberations about personhood. We might say that if science cannot decide the question of personhood, neither can it be decided without science.For my review of embryological science... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Against Ethical CriticismRichard A. PosnerOscar Wilde famously remarked that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” He was echoed by Auden, who said in his poem in memory of William Butler Yeats that poetry makes nothing happen (though the poem as a whole qualifies this overstatement), by Croce, and by formalist critics such as (...) Cleanth Brooks, a doyen of the New Critics, who insisted that edification was the function of religion but not of poetry. 1 George Orwell, though himself a didactic novelist, was of this view as well, 2 and it is one that most critics adopt when the issue is censorship. I accept Wilde’s thesis—the creed of aestheticism, of art for art’s sake—if understood to mean that the moral content and consequences of a work of literature are irrelevant to its value as literature; or as the critic Helen Vendler has put it, that “treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.” 3 This is not to deny that reading can have consequences, including moral and political ones. Information affects people’s outlook and behavior, and reading is a source of information. Imaginative literature conveys ideas, opinions, and information, often with great power. Think of the role that novels by Turgenev (Fathers and Sons), Dostoevsky (The Possessed), Conrad (The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes), Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Orwell (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four), and, of course, Solzhenitsyn played in exposing the horrors of anarchism and communism. Of A Passage to India it has been said that “as an account of the social conditions of British India it was powerful enough to have influenced events.” 4 Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is thought to have incited federal regulation of food processing; and few doubt the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) on the abolitionist cause. [End Page 1]At the core of the aesthetic tradition, which I shall be defending in this essay particularly against its opponents in the “law and literature” movement, are three theses. First, immersion in literature does not make us better citizens or better people. One might be able to pick out some works of literature that would have such an effect because of the information they convey or the emotional state they induce, but they would constitute a skewed sample of literary works. Second, we should not be put off by morally offensive views encountered in literature even when the author appears to share them. A work of literature is not to be considered maimed or even marred by expressing unacceptable moral views; by the same token, a mediocre work of literature is not redeemed by expressing moral views of which we approve. The proper criteria for evaluating literature are aesthetic rather than ethical. Third, authors’ moral qualities or opinions should not affect our valuations of their works.The insistence, in short, is on the separation of the moral from the aesthetic—but with two qualifications. Some literature has little interest or value apart from the didactic and for it the proper criticism is didactic. And the separation of moral from aesthetic values is not a rejection of the former. The aesthetic outlook is a moral outlook, one that stresses the values of openness, detachment, hedonism, curiosity, tolerance, the cultivation of the self, and the preservation of a private sphere—in short, the values of liberal individualism.The counter tradition in literary criticism to the aesthetic originates with Plato and insists upon the importance, in some versions to the near or even total exclusion of anything else, of the ethical or political content and effects of works of literature, and less commonly of the author’s own morality. Martha Nussbaum, for example, deems Greek tragedies and Anglo-American realistic novels a part of moral philosophy. 5 Reading novels, she argues, “develops moral capacities without which citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any moral or political theory, however excellent.” 6 Wayne Booth, disagreeing with his illustrious... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William James, A Pluralistic Universe. A New Philosophical ReadingRichard A. S. Hall William James, A Pluralistic Universe. A New Philosophical Reading. Ed. H. G. Callaway. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.In 1907 William James was invited to give the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford. Initially he was reluctant to do so since he feared undertaking them would divert him from developing rigorously and systematically some metaphysical ideas (...) of his own that had preoccupied him for some time. [End Page 130]In the end, however, he relented and in the spring of 1908 gave the lectures which were subsequently published as A Pluralistic Universe.As it happened, though, in the course of these lectures James presented some of those metaphysical ideas, though in a popular and informal style appropriate to lecturing. Later on he did get down to working out a systematic metaphysics in proper academic style, but the project was cut short by his untimely death in 1910. The incomplete Some Problems of Philosophy,posthumously published in 1911, recapitulates some major themes of A Pluralistic Universe.When James addressed his Oxford audience, the time was ripe for the advancement of his own brand of metaphysical pluralism and radical empiricism in opposition to the still-regnant forms of monistic idealism as represented by Bradley, Green, and Royce. The hegemony in the philosophical world long enjoyed by idealism was beginning to break up—something noted by James in his first lecture—due in no small part to the very ideas aired in his lectures and the then newly emerging schools of pragmatism and realism. The period between 1914 and 1918 not only rings the death knell of European imperialism but also, significantly, marks the watershed between nineteenth-and twentieth-century philosophy.The argument of A Pluralistic Universerevolves around the Parmenidean conundrum of the one-and-the-many. It is the solution to this problem that was the main bone of contention between James and absolute idealists like F. H. Bradley, T. H. Green, and Josiah Royce. For them, the world in reality is but one thing, though appearing illusorily as many, with a pervasive unity throughout—it is a "block-universe," to use James's expression for it; for James, by contrast, the world is irreducibly many things whose unities are partial and shifting. The gravamen of James's objections to absolute idealism was its monism, though he objected no less strenuously to other ideas associated with it: its doctrine of internal relations; its determinism; and, in particular, its deprecation of experience in favor of concepts (what James condemns as "vicious intellectualism"). James proposed, against this monolithic idealism, the alternative hypothesis of metaphysical pluralism. Here he affirmed the reality of external relations (particularly conjunctions) among things and the continuities within experience, thereby making his empiricism "radical." He approached experience phenomenologically, finding it, not concepts, to be constitutive of reality, the value of concepts being more practical than theoretical. He conceived of the universe as being open-ended, where human agency can make a difference for the better.A subtext of A Pluralistic Universeis James's advocacy of something like [End Page 131]traditional theism in contradistinction to the pantheism of absolute idealism. He rightly notes that the Absolute is not the God of Christianity. He believes that his pluralistic ontology allows for, and the religious experiences of people abundantly attest to, the existence of a personal God, albeit a finite one, with whom communion and commerce is possible. At a deeper, psychological level, though, A Pluralistic Universeis an expression of James's own desire to feel "at home" in the universe, a desire, I should add, that he shares with many protagonists of classic American fiction, and which is perhaps intensified by the experience of inhabiting and accommodating one's self to the relatively unfamiliar New World. He complains about the "foreignness" of the Absolute in objective idealism and of that sovereign God, in traditional theisms, subsisting beyond all human influence or effects.Howard Callaway's recent edition of James's Hibbert Lectures joins the Harvard edition of them, with a foreword by Richard J. Bernstein, as an indispensable volume of James's... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Justice Not GreedRichard A. HoehnJustice Not Greed Edited by Pamela Brubaker and Rogate Mshana Geneva: WCC Publications, 2010. 224 pp. $14.00The World Council of Churches (WCC) Advisory Group on Economic Matters (AGEM) advises the WCC and congregations on global economic issues. AGEM members from diverse backgrounds produced the papers in this volume. The introduction is by Rogate Mshana, WCC director for Peace, Justice, and Creation. Samuel Kobia, general (...) secretary of the WCC from 2004–9, introduces the rationale and role of AGEM in the global financial crisis. The book ends with a statement on just finance and the economy of life, adopted by the WCC Central Committee in September 2009. Justice Not Greed will be most useful in settings where there is interest in the intersection of ethics, the economic crisis, and Christianity in relation to the global economy, as well as among those who wish to follow the WCC. As expected [End Page 208] of conference papers, there is not a systematic development of an argument but overlapping ethical and economic analyses. All, however, are opposed to the status quo because of its manifest injustice, especially the impact on poor people.If one were to impose a thematic development, it might go something like this, allowing for individual differences among the authors. Decolonization has resulted in a lopsided, Western, capitalist economic system predicated on greed (Jan Pronk), described by other authors as a beast or a cancer (vivid but unhelpful metaphors since the crisis was caused by humans, not nature). The world lacks appropriate international structures. We need new global institutions, a new global financial architecture that is predicated on, or at least takes into account, justice. Congregations, the ecumenical movement, and the WCC could play a significant role in helping the United Nations move toward such a system.Several authors hope that the global crisis will provide a moment when such a change might become possible (e.g., Alexander Cobham’s “Blood-Stained Silver Lining”). Pamela K. Brubaker, Kim Yong-Bock, Roel Aalbersberg, Rienzie Perera, and Geevarghese Mor Coorilos examine questions related to the Bible, ethics, theology, a culture of “enough for all” (Musa Panti Filibus), the church as moral community, the ecumenical movement, and principles for an alternative economic system. Mariana Issa Zureikat argues for “econo-morals,” applying moral values to economic analyses. Thomas H. Kang advocates the capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Marcos Arruda suggests an economy of world solidarity with the “gross happiness index” as a standard for measuring progress. While most chapters include economic analysis, John Dillon wades into some nitty-gritty causes of the current financial crisis, with a positive nod toward the (never adopted) Keynes plan for the Bretton Woods system of monetary management. Marie-Aimee Tourres lays out impacts on the developing world, as does Xiao Lian from a Chinese perspective. Most of these authors argue for such global solutions as a global reserve system and a global tax system.Justice Not Greed presents thoughtful, sometimes passionate papers that could form a basis for lively discussion. Yet real-world solutions often come down to the practice of democracy and political will. Unfortunately, it is not clear that the ecumenical movement possesses the will or the means to effect change because local organizing for political change is not a high priority at any level. [End Page 209]Richard A. HoehnChrist the Servant Lutheran ChurchCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’ Meditations: Background Source Materials ed. by Roger Ariew, John Cottingham, and Tom SorellRichard A. WatsonRoger Ariew, John Cottingham, and Tom Sorell, editors. Descartes’ Meditations: Background Source Materials. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xviii + 170. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $18.95.This volume includes primarily source materials from authors who were contemporary to Descartes’s composition of the Meditations. Thus there are no selections from Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne, for (...) example, who were more influential on the Meditations than some of the authors excerpted. Of course their influence is already amply documented by such scholars as Gilson and Gouhier. Probably the most important source included is Suárez, whose role is championed by Jean-Luc Marion in several works. Readers should look for the forthcoming Index Augustino-Cartèsian: Textes et Commentaire by Zbigniew Janowski (Paris: J. Vrin) for a startling challenge to the view that Descartes is Suárezian.In the volume under review, Eustachius a Sancto Paulo is of special interest because Descartes thought of refuting him item by item (but decided exposition of his own view would be adequate). In his youth Descartes had a definite interest in Petrus Ramus, although Beeckman told him his method consisted of tired old tricks. Francisco Sanches and Pierre Charron are important for their expositions of sceptical arguments and attitudes. Christopher Clavius is Descartes’s direct predecessor in mathematical analysis, and none of Descartes’s protests that he never read the man has convinced anyone. Scipion Dupleix is a fine example of how the Old Philosophy appeared to the New Philosophers, and Marin Mersenne, of course, compiled material on every subject Descartes ever had an interest in. Pierre Gassendi exercised Descartes’s ire more than any other commentator on the Meditations, and Descartes again probably read Gassendi’s continuing criticisms even though he claimed he wouldn’t. [End Page 366]Of special interest is Jean de Silhon, an old friend of Descartes’s who published a book containing a proto-cogito three years before the Meditations appeared. François de la Mothe le Vayer represents the libertine strain many detect in Descartes’s writings, while Jean-Baptiste Morin provides fodder for those who detect Descartes’s piety, although Descartes asserts that the man is an idiot for defending the immobility of the earth. Finally, Charles Sorel provides an example of the deductive mode of exposition in a text that shows that the notion of a unified science was more than Cartesian. One contemporary who was left out and should have been included was the Augustinian Guillaume Gibieuf.But overall, this is an interesting and useful collection of works Descartes doubtless knew. [End Page 367]Richard A. WatsonWashington UniversityCopyright © 1999 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Cigarette smoke is by far the leading preventable cause of death and disease in the United States. It has been estimated to kill between 419,000 and 589,000 smokers and up to 65,000 non-smokers each year. This premier status is hardly a new development, having been true for most of the last century, and known to be true at least since the first Surgeon General’s Report in 1964.Why then are tobacco products exempt from any significant federal oversight or control? Why do (...) cigarette advertisements, pitched to young smokers and non-smokers, continue to be plastered on every available surface inside and outside many convenience stores and to adorn the pages of popular magazines? Why, decades since the makers of far less dangerous products began to be held accountable in tort law, was the first payment by a cigarette company on a products liability judgment not made until 2001? (shrink)

Cigarette smoke is by far the leading preventable cause of death and disease in the United States. It has been estimated to kill between 419,000 and 589,000 smokers and up to 65,000 non-smokers each year. This premier status is hardly a new development, having been true for most of the last century, and known to be true at least since the first Surgeon General’s Report in 1964.Why then are tobacco products exempt from any significant federal oversight or control? Why do (...) cigarette advertisements, pitched to young smokers and non-smokers, continue to be plastered on every available surface inside and outside many convenience stores and to adorn the pages of popular magazines? Why, decades since the makers of far less dangerous products began to be held accountable in tort law, was the first payment by a cigarette company on a products liability judgment not made until 2001? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Reproduction: Dominion and LimitsRichard A. McCormick S.J. (bio)The general struggle throughout Christian history has been to seek the proper balance between dominion and limits, intervention and nonintervention, givenness, and creativity. This struggle has worked itself out in six areas that touch human life. In this essay, I will revisit the Catholic tradition’s treatment of these in terms of dominion and limits to see whether we can discern developmental (...) patterns that might suggest an approach to issues pertaining to the sources of life (reproductive ethics) as we move into the next century.1. Abortion. The history of the treatment of abortion in the Catholic tradition is the history of an evaluation. This evaluation was somewhat muddied by [End Page 387] unclarity and inconsistency in the use of terms. Thus, some theologians distinguished three types of abortion: prevention of conception, abortion of an inanimate fetus, and abortion of an animated fetus. Others regarded all interventions into the life-giving process as homicides. Still others argued that termination of a nonanimated fetus was justified to save the life of the mother. And still others said such termination was anticipated homicide or the misuse of semen conceptum.Such unclarities and qualifications eventually vanished and produced an evaluation of fetal life that yielded to very few competing interests, what John Noonan (1970) referred to as “an almost absolute value.” There was some dominion or control, but the limits became increasingly clear and powerful.2. Individual and corporate self-defense. Augustine disallowed lethal individual or personal self-defense, but established the first elementary rules for war. Aquinas allowed both. Vitoria, Suarez, and others refined the criteria justifying war (jus ad bellum) and listed them as three: recovery of property, resistance to aggression, and vindication of injuries (injustices). Pius XII narrowed these to a single reason: national self-defense. The Challenge of Peace (NCCB 1983) moves away from the licitness of nuclear war and nuclear deterrence even for self-defense. Once again, the limits to the dominion over life in war grow stronger and more powerful even as the weapons of such dominion grow more powerful.3. Capital punishment. Over the centuries, Christian thinkers, such as Thomas Aquinas, permitted the use of capital punishment. Three justifications were proposed to found this right of the state: retribution, deterrence, and reform. In the past decades, however, these justifications have been seriously questioned. Both the American and Philippine bishops’ conferences have rejected all use of capital punishment. Most recently John Paul II (1995, n. 56, p. 709) adduces defense of society as the only possible justification for it and sees such cases as “very rare if not practically non-existent.”4. The preservation of life. The theme of a balance between dominion and limits is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the Catholic approach to life preservation. Catholic tradition does not accept our culture’s rejection of death. Rather it asserts that the facts that we are pilgrims, that Christ has overcome death and lives, and that we also will live with him yield a general value judgment on the meaning and value of life as we now live it: Life is a basic good but not an absolute one. It is basic because, as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1980, p. 511) worded it, it is the “necessary source and condition of every human activity and of all society.” It is not absolute because there are higher goods for which life can be sacrificed—e.g., the glory of God, salvation of souls, service of one’s brethren, and the like. Thus in John (15:13): “There is no greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. John Paul II (1995, n. 47, p. 706) briefly summarizes this in Evangelium Vitae: “The life of the body in its earthly state is not an absolute good for the believer.” This value [End Page 388] judgment has immediate relevance for care of the ill and dying: Not all means must be used to preserve life.Thus the Catholic tradition has moved between two extremes: medico-moral optimism or vitalism (which preserves life with all means, at any cost... (shrink)

The web creates manyopportunities for encroachment on intellectualproperty including trademarks. Our principaltask in this paper is an investigation into anunusual form of such encroachment: theimproper use of metatags. A metatag is a pieceof HTML code that provides summary informationabout a web page. If used in an appropriatemanner, these metatags can play a legitimaterole in helping consumers locate information. But the ``keyword'' metatag is particularlysusceptible to manipulation. These tags can beeasily abused by web site creators anxious tobait search engines and (...) bring scores ofvisitors to their sites. The law aboutmetatags is far from settled and many legalscholars are uncomfortable with the conclusionthat the unauthorized use of a trademark in ametatag represents infringement. How should weassess this practice known as ``spamdexing'' froma normative perspective? Is it commercial fairplay or something more sinister? We make thecase here that there are salient moral problemswith spamdexing since it exploits thereputational goodwill of trademark owners andconfuses consumers. It violates basic moralduties and it flouts the golden rule principle. Hence unauthorized use of a competitor'strademark in a metatag is not morallyacceptable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editor’s IntroductionRichard A. Cohen (bio) and Jolanta Saldukaitytė (bio)For more than a decade, Levinas Studies has served admirably as the only English-language journal dedicated exclusively to the academic study of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. It is an honor to coedit an issue of Levinas Studies — not only to contribute articles but also to organize an entire volume. Volume 11 of Levinas Studies gathers together essays from scholars (...) who have (with the exception of James Mensch) participated in one or more of the annual Levinas Philosophy Summer Seminar (LPSS), held from 2013 to 2016, directed by Richard A. Cohen, with the assistance of James McLachlan, and organized jointly by Cohen and Jolanta Saldukaitytė, coeditors of the present volume.The LPSS has met in different countries at different venues around the world, each time with ten invited international participants (and some additional auditors). Each summer these dedicated scholars join up for one very intense week of reading and conversation, finding a deeper understanding of an important topic in Levinas’s philosophy. As a one-week Seminar for College and University Teachers, 16 American scholars gathered at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), Buffalo, to discuss “Emmanuel Levinas: On Morality, Justice and the Political.” As the ancient Greek philosophers along with the biblical prophets understood, ethics and politics are inseparable. [End Page vii]Participants usually attend only one LPSS, but some have returned for more, and two scholars have attended four. This and Levinas’s philosophy, and a few e-mail updates to former participants, have created a modicum of continuity and group spirit, or so we hope. The contents of the present volume of Levinas Studies contributes to that collegiality and continuing discussion, enabling a much wider audience of Levinas scholars to look over our shoulders, as it were, and join the conversation. Most of the topics and concerns of the present issue of Levinas Studies — embodiment, Eros, aesthetics, Kant, and difficult freedom — reflect those of past LPSS gatherings.Volume 11 starts with Irina Poleshchuk’s essay, “Transcendence and Sensibility: Affection, Sensation, and Nonintentional Consciousness.” Underscoring the importance of sensibility in Levinas’s philosophy, she shows that subjectivity is not only a vulnerable and affected selfhood but also that, in and through, its sensible subjectivity is endowed with transcendence. Affected by the other, the vulnerability and sensibility of selfhood are “nonintentional” and radically passive. By introducing the phenomenon of a sensibility with two distinct dimensions — one on the level of enjoyment and the other on the suffering of the face-to-face encounter — she shows the double character of affection, both constituting and constituted. Sensibility is both source and shocked in the face-to-face relation. Elaborating sensibility as enjoyment and sensibility as nonintentional consciousness and passivity, Poleshchuk deepens our understanding of the core Levinasian structures of one-for-the-other and hospitality. In contrast to the idealistic leanings of philosophy’s ontological tradition, Poleshchuk shows that transcendence in Levinas’s ethical philosophy becomes flesh in sensibility.Sensibility also features centrally in Brigitta Keintzel’s essay, “ ‘Like a Virgin’: Levinas’s Anti-Platonic Understanding of Love and Desire.” This essay questions how sensual love and ethical desire relate to Levinas’s description of the relations linking “intimate” and “real” society. On the one hand, she shows that Levinasian ethical desire coincides with the Platonic notion of love as desire, and hence not as an existing or already accomplished knowledge. On the other hand, Keintzel [End Page viii] underlines that Platonic love does not coincide with what Levinas calls “Desire,” since the latter is directed not toward an idea but toward the face of the Other. Love for Levinas begins as a subject addressed in his/her direct, vulnerable, traumatized passivity. Eros lies in love’s ability to orient itself to the future. Virginity, then, has to be understood beyond biological attributes, in relation to the intersubjective transcendence that defines the human as such. “Like a virgin” is not biological innocence, or eternal youth, or an exclusively female matter, but being “not-yet,” the open orientation of one to the Other. Finally, the figure of the Third — care for others, for justice — deepens the difference between ethical desire and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 415-416 [Access article in PDF] Tad M. Schmaltz. Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv + 288. Cloth, $65.00.More than fifty years ago Richard H. Popkin urged historians of philosophy to work on secondary figures in philosophy, in part for their own sake, but also because the true shape of philosophy and the (...) development of major figures can be understood only through examination of the intellectual milieu out of which they arose. Among others he specifically mentioned Robert Desgabets, Jean Du Hamel, Simon Foucher, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Pierre-Sylvain Regis, and Henricus Regius. Now in Radical Cartesianism, Tad Schmaltz has provided a masterful and erudite study of these and other philosophers who are minor now but were major in their day. The importance of this study is not just that it illuminates the metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche, and clarifies the relationship of these philosophers to Arnauld, Jansenism, Plato, and the Aristotelian scholasticism of the day, but also that it opens to view an intricate and significant body of thought. The radical Cartesianism Schmaltz examines addresses and provides solutions to problems of the relationship between mind and body, between man and God, and between ideas and the external world that continue to engage philosophers today. Schmaltz concludes his study with the suggestion that these philosophers might have had more latter-day influence if larger historical events, in particular the death of Louis XIV and the subsequent relaxation of attacks on Jansenism (and on supposed Jansenist Cartesianism) had not led to interest in matters other than the Eucharist and the nature of the soul that were major issues among the radical Cartesians and their opponents.But were any of these radical Cartesians actually Cartesians? If, as Schmaltz says, the metaphysical core of Cartesianism is Descartes's doctrine that "the essence of body consists in extension and that the essence of mind consists in thought" (10), then most of his followers were not radical Cartesians, but rather heretical Cartesians. They rebelled against as many of Descartes's doctrines as they accepted. Schmaltz's careful expositions, analyses, comparisons, correlations, and extrapolations of their arguments and positions make up the bulk of his book. The detail, command of the material, insight, and breadth of Schmaltz's exposition is on an order of magnitude above previous work on these figures and will stand for a long time as a challenge to the next few generations of scholars.But if so many of these figures alter Descartes's metaphysics so radically, why do they still designate themselves as Cartesians? The major reason is that while Cartesian metaphysics was in disarray, Cartesian science was flourishing. Regius is the model. He said (directly to Descartes) that metaphysics is inessential to science, that matters of God and certainty about the existence of the external world could and should be left to faith. What was liberating during the third quarter of the century in The Netherlands and in the fourth quarter in France was Descartes's scientific method of posing hypotheses and testing them with experiments. You will never get certainty this way, but already science was advancing by leaps and bounds. Christian Huygens, who as a boy had known Descartes, belittled the man's metaphysics, but was one of the greatest and most successful practitioners of the [End Page 415] Cartesian scientific method of his time. What remains to be written is a study of late-seventeenth-century Cartesian science that is as excellent and comprehensive as Schmaltz's study of the Cartesian metaphysics of the time. Here are some problems Descartes set up that are of particular concern to the philosophers of the time. If God can do anything, even make contradictions true, then why could he not make you think you exist even when you do not? How could you think of something that does not exist? Because your thoughts have a temporal dimension, and time depends on motion, and motion pertains only to material bodies, how could you... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Levinas on Art and AestheticismGetting “Reality and Its Shadow” RightRichard A. Cohen (bio)1. The Standard Misreading of Levinas on Arta. IntroductionMuch has been written in the secondary literature about Levinas and art and about Levinas and literature more specifically. In addition to Maurice Blanchot’s observations in The Writing of the Disaster, which is more a primary text than a secondary source, two exceptional studies — well-written, insightful, nuanced, erudite (...) — in English on Levinas and literature are Robert Eaglestone’s book of 1997 entitled Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas and Jill Robbins’s 1999 book entitled Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature.1 No doubt there are other fine studies, but these two will be sufficient for our purposes. They are scholarly in the best sense, effecting to understand Levinas first of all, hence hermeneutically sympathetic, and at the same time taking critical distances, articulating reservations, basically unconvinced by Levinas’s claims. Unfortunately, given all their considerable virtues, these books are also hampered by a serious flaw, one that unhappily appears in all too much of the secondary literature on Levinas and art. [End Page 149] Despite their good will and intelligence, both books fundamentally misunderstand the relation of Levinas’s thought on and to art, and thus also his relation to literature more specifically, because they misconstrue the nature and the status of Levinas’s account of art within his philosophy. Surely this is serious and unfortunate. One aim of the present essay is to expose this flaw, despite its pervasiveness and entrenchment. Another aim, more positive and ultimately the means by which to accomplish the first, is to present a faithful account of what Levinas really has to say about art.Counter to the misgivings leveled against Levinas in the above two books, not to mention the many commentaries that repeat more or less the same things, the present article proposes two theses in his defense. To the charge that Levinas has misrepresented art, my first claim is that Levinas does not misrepresent art and, indeed, that he has a fine sense of it. To the charge that Levinas is hostile to art, my second claim is that Levinas is not at all hostile to art, one sign of which — noticed by both critics — is the literary and aesthetic references that abound in his own writings. That is to say, contrary to his critics, Levinas grasps quite well the nature and the value of art. His own literary practices, found throughout his own writings, some of them quite obvious, such as exegeses of Shakespeare and repeated citations taken from Dostoevsky and Grossman, not to mention a wealth of other references and allusions to artists and writers, and, of course, including explicit comments and discussions about art, all these are consistent with and help underwrite my larger claim that Levinas understands and values art and, indeed, that he understands it very well and values it highly.To be sure, and no one can mistake this, Levinas’s philosophy is ultimately an ethics and not an aesthetics. The ultimum verbum belongs not to aesthetics but to moral responsibility and the quest for justice. It is here, for those who would make aesthetics ultimate, that the rub lies, here that we find the spur and speculum for their distortion and darkening of Levinas on art. All the more necessary, then, are the two sides of the present essay: to understand properly what Levinas is saying by means of a careful reading of his one article devoted entirely to [End Page 150] art, “Reality and Its Shadow,” to discern in as unprejudiced a fashion as possible what Levinas actually has to say about art and its value, and by so proceeding to unmask the inadequacies of Levinas’s aesthetic critics. Getting Levinas right certainly does not foreclose criticism, by any means. It is, nevertheless, the first step to serious criticism or to acceptance. Getting him wrong, however, goes nowhere at all, because it has not even begun.Inasmuch as their mishandling of Levinas is in an important sense basically the same, in the following I treat Robbins’s Altered Reading and Eaglestone’s... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Levinas on Art and AestheticismGetting “Reality and Its Shadow” RightRichard A. Cohen (bio)1. The Standard Misreading of Levinas on Arta. IntroductionMuch has been written in the secondary literature about Levinas and art and about Levinas and literature more specifically. In addition to Maurice Blanchot’s observations in The Writing of the Disaster, which is more a primary text than a secondary source, two exceptional studies — well-written, insightful, nuanced, erudite (...) — in English on Levinas and literature are Robert Eaglestone’s book of 1997 entitled Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas and Jill Robbins’s 1999 book entitled Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature.1 No doubt there are other fine studies, but these two will be sufficient for our purposes. They are scholarly in the best sense, effecting to understand Levinas first of all, hence hermeneutically sympathetic, and at the same time taking critical distances, articulating reservations, basically unconvinced by Levinas’s claims. Unfortunately, given all their considerable virtues, these books are also hampered by a serious flaw, one that unhappily appears in all too much of the secondary literature on Levinas and art. [End Page 149] Despite their good will and intelligence, both books fundamentally misunderstand the relation of Levinas’s thought on and to art, and thus also his relation to literature more specifically, because they misconstrue the nature and the status of Levinas’s account of art within his philosophy. Surely this is serious and unfortunate. One aim of the present essay is to expose this flaw, despite its pervasiveness and entrenchment. Another aim, more positive and ultimately the means by which to accomplish the first, is to present a faithful account of what Levinas really has to say about art.Counter to the misgivings leveled against Levinas in the above two books, not to mention the many commentaries that repeat more or less the same things, the present article proposes two theses in his defense. To the charge that Levinas has misrepresented art, my first claim is that Levinas does not misrepresent art and, indeed, that he has a fine sense of it. To the charge that Levinas is hostile to art, my second claim is that Levinas is not at all hostile to art, one sign of which — noticed by both critics — is the literary and aesthetic references that abound in his own writings. That is to say, contrary to his critics, Levinas grasps quite well the nature and the value of art. His own literary practices, found throughout his own writings, some of them quite obvious, such as exegeses of Shakespeare and repeated citations taken from Dostoevsky and Grossman, not to mention a wealth of other references and allusions to artists and writers, and, of course, including explicit comments and discussions about art, all these are consistent with and help underwrite my larger claim that Levinas understands and values art and, indeed, that he understands it very well and values it highly.To be sure, and no one can mistake this, Levinas’s philosophy is ultimately an ethics and not an aesthetics. The ultimum verbum belongs not to aesthetics but to moral responsibility and the quest for justice. It is here, for those who would make aesthetics ultimate, that the rub lies, here that we find the spur and speculum for their distortion and darkening of Levinas on art. All the more necessary, then, are the two sides of the present essay: to understand properly what Levinas is saying by means of a careful reading of his one article devoted entirely to [End Page 150] art, “Reality and Its Shadow,” to discern in as unprejudiced a fashion as possible what Levinas actually has to say about art and its value, and by so proceeding to unmask the inadequacies of Levinas’s aesthetic critics. Getting Levinas right certainly does not foreclose criticism, by any means. It is, nevertheless, the first step to serious criticism or to acceptance. Getting him wrong, however, goes nowhere at all, because it has not even begun.Inasmuch as their mishandling of Levinas is in an important sense basically the same, in the following I treat Robbins’s Altered Reading and Eaglestone’s... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Decline of Literary CriticismRichard A. PosnerRónán McDonald, a lecturer in literature at the University of Reading, has written a short, engaging book the theme of which is evident from the title: The Death of the Critic. Although there is plenty of both academic and journalistic writing about literature, less and less is well described by the term "literary criticism." The literary critics of the first two-thirds or so (...) of the twentieth century, now dead, including poets and other creative writers, such as T. S. Eliot, journalists such as Edmund Wilson, and academic literary critics, as distinct from literary scholars, such as F. R. Leavis in England and Cleanth Brooks in the United States, have so few successors that the very genre, if not yet dead, is moribund.1 McDonald deplores the decline of literary criticism and seeks to explain its causes.In place of literary criticism, McDonald (and many others, such as John Ellis) argue, we have postmodern literary theory, an animal of quite a different color from literary criticism.2 "Texts... are interpreted and analysed with a view to unlocking the social norms and attitudes encoded therein, not assessed or evaluated as integral, self-contained creations" (McDonald, p. 21). "The 'best' [is regarded] as a politically dubious category, with selections made in its name often nurturing hidden and hierarchical agendas"(p. ix). "In a comparatively short time, [End Page 385] academic literary criticism has been transformed. Many [literary critics] now regard social activism as the major purpose of literary criticism." And "people who write about literature now write in a prose thick with impenetrable jargon," which erects a barrier between literary theory and literature.3 The well documented decline in the reading of literature has many causes but one may be the obscurantist and politicized style of teaching literature that is in vogue in many colleges.4But something deeper is involved. After all, most literary teachers are not postmodernists. What has happened is the professionalization, in not altogether a good sense, of literary studies. Let me illustrate. More than half a century ago, Cleanth Brooks published what became a famous book of literary criticism, consisting of close readings of famous poems.5 The New Critics were much taken with the metaphysical poets, the most prominent of whom was John Donne, and the high point of Brooks's book was his brilliant close reading of "Canonization," one of Donne's most famous love poems. Just this year (2008) a professor of literature named Ramie Targoff published John Donne, Soul and Body, which has an extensive treatment of Donne's love poetry, though it does not mention "Canonization." As far as I can judge, Targoff's book is a fine scholarly achievement—well written (and not defaced by jargon), thoroughly researched, thoughtful, imaginative. She argues that contrary to some scholars who have regarded Donne as a Neoplatonist who therefore believed that the highest love is purely spiritual (as it was for Plato), he was, throughout his career—even when he became a fiercely devout Anglican cleric writing fervid religious verse—a believer that body and soul were one in all activities, including sexual love; hence the religious imagery in "Canonization," emphasized by Cleanth Brooks, who would I think have found Targoff's analysis congenial. Her book is I would guess a model of modern literary scholarship.But here is the difference between Brooks's book, and specifically his discussion of Donne's poem, and Targoff's. Brooks, who though a distinguished Yale English professor did not have a Ph.D., wrote for a mixed audience—academics, students, the general reader—and he made the nonacademic members of that audience want to read Donne, or read more Donne, or re-read Donne with greater understanding and enjoyment. Targoff writes for other scholars of early modern English literature. Someone else who chances on the book (like me) may read it and think well of it, but unless one has esoteric religious or philosophical interests the experience of reading her book will not quicken one's [End Page 386] interest in reading Donne's poetry—which is a great shame, given the state of the literary culture... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy by Susan JamesRichard A. WatsonSusan James. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. vii + 318. Cloth, $35.00.Susan James shows how during the seventeenth century philosophers moved from the three souls of Aristotle and the tripartite soul of Thomas Aquinas in which passions and reasons compete for the attention of the will, (...) to a Cartesian view of man as a single soul in union with the body who wills under the influence of both passions and reasons, to a Hobbesian view that the soul is the body and that the bodily motions we call reasons and passions are desires; acts of will are merely the deciding desires in deterministic causal sequences of the material motions of the body that constitute desires. This sets up the contemporary view that, motions are caused by desires and beliefs, leaving behind the difficulties of integrating with one another Aristotelian souls, Thomistic faculties, and Cartesian mind and body. James conceives of this evolution as one of unification of mental and bodily powers, and of integration of the active and passive powers of the mind. This concourse also represents a development from theories meant to explain to theories calculated for control and finally to theories facilitating therapy. Aristotle and Thomas adapted their ontologies to perceived differences in powers and faculties, while Descartes and Hobbes worked toward an ideal of unity of science and nature. The Christian Descartes brought together all the substances and powers of nature under a single extended matter divided into parts by the single force of motion, but he excepted the human soul with its power of will to alter the course of nature. The atheist Hobbes simply dispensed with supernatural [End Page 168] mental substance and occult power of will in order to integrate the whole of nature (including sensing and reasoning) under a cause and effect sequence of moving material bodies in which the last desire in a sequence of human bodily motions is designated as an act of will.James intends her book “as a contribution to the reinstatement of the emotions within philosophy, to the… opinion that we need to take account of our emotional life if we are to understand… moral motivation and growth, the springs of action (rational and otherwise), and the nature of reasoning” (22). She agrees that the sharp division between ideas and passions or emotions is properly abolished to be replaced by the view that all ideas have an emotional component, and all passions an ideational component. This fits with the parallel development of the notion that all sensible perceptions are propositional, and the somewhat less widespread notion that all concepts have a sensible component.But did this development result in a view of passions and ideas, learning and knowing, thinking and action, that is more true to nature than Aristotelian ontology? It is very hard to answer this question, and despite her sympathies with the notion that all human thought is both conceptual and emotional, James does not try. The reason we don’t know lies under the surface of the movement from Aristotle to Hobbes (i.e., to Daniel Dennett) like a monster in the deep. The monster is the monotheistic God, the perfection and unity of which underlies the Western drive to a unitary view of nature including man. The possibility that this God could be a deceiver, and so all our sensations and ideas might not represent the real world, set up Cartesianism and modern hypothetico-deductive science. But lurking throughout James’ book is a more palpable dreadnought, a demoness, the woman Eve. The female is responsible for the Fall of Man, and thus the fear and suspicion of women that suffuses patriarchic Christianity, and is expressed openly by such philosophers as Malebranche. Bodily passions and emotions (particularly the concupiscent ones) are nasty, evil, irrational, overpowering; to wit, they are feminine. They are not to be trusted, and must be subdued. So while still driven by ideals of monotheism, Descartes and Hobbes do move beyond the dogmatic Christian association of the emotions with female treachery. Even so... (shrink)

As the World Wide Web has grown in popularity, the propriety of linking to other web sites has achieved some prominence as an important moral and legal issue. Hyperlinks represent the essence of Web-based activity, since they facilitate navigation in a unique and efficient fashion. But the pervasive activity of linking has generated notable controversies. While most sites welcome and support incoming links, others block them or seek to license them in some way. Particularly problematic are so-called 'deep links,' which (...) bypass the home page along with the extensive advertising and promotional material that is usually found there. While some contend that a site's mere presence on the web is implicit permission for virtually any form of linking, others argue that at least in some circumstances deep linking is unfair and constitutes misappropriation of intellectual property.In this paper we will explore the issue of deep linking from a distinctly moral vantage point. While legal scholars have vigorously debated this issue, it has received little attention from moralists. But deep linking raises a plethora of complex property issues with subtle moral implications, and hence it deserves our careful scrutiny. The most fundamental question concerns the appropriate scope of property rights for a web site and how those rights can be properly balanced against the common good of free and open communications on the Web. It is our contention that there is no presumptive claim to the liberty of deep linking at will, since it may be disrespectful of property rights in certain situations. In order to defend this position we first make the case that a web site is a form of intellectual property, drawing support from the major theories that justify property ownership. Once we have established that a web site is really property, we consider the specific rights implied by such ownership. We conclude that on the basis of those rights, a prima facie case can be made that because of the potential for negative effects, users should not presume that deep linking is acceptable unless they first seek out the permission of the target web site.We also fully appreciate the dangers inherent in propertizing the web and the need to encourage the most flexible forms of linking. Therefore, we argue that any arbitrary or unnecessary restrictions against deep linking should be eschewed for the sake of the common good of open communications, flexibility, and maximum porosity in the Internet environment. While web site authors may indeed have a property right in their creative work they have a correlative obligation to promote the sharing and free flow of information when their specific ownership rights are not put in jeopardy by deep linking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 353-356 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Metaphysical Club The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand; xii & 546 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, $27.00. "They didn't just want to keep the conversation going; they wanted to get to a better place" (p. 440). So much for the most prominent contemporary pragmatist, Richard Rorty, who remains unmentioned except in the (...) acknowledgments. That better place is participatory democracy (a phrase that does not appear in the book), which "means that everyone is equally in the game, but it also means that no one can opt out" (p. 441). The true name of the game is skeptical tolerance. There are no unquestionable duties or inalienable rights, no immutable natural laws, no absolute moral rules, no highest principles, no inherent virtues, no absolute standards, no stasis, no absolutely certain truth. There are no individual destinies, because the social comes before the individual, and the individual is embedded within and cannot exist without society. Scientific knowledge is always probabilistic, not necessarily because nature is indeterministic, but because we can never know enough to calculate its regularities if they exist. To wit, there are no Platonic Ideas or unchanging universals. All is change, nothing that happens is ever repeated, our general ideas and laws of nature are merely tools for getting along in the world. Above all, ideas do not refer to things, only to other ideas. What expedites our thinking is true. What expedites our acting is right. Whenever we act according to principle, rule, or law, we are making a bet that events will turn out the way [End Page 353] we think they will. If we keep this always in mind, we will never succumb to violence or war in the name of belief or principle. Whatever we believe, it could be otherwise. Such is a general summary of pragmatism as it has filtered down to the textbooks. It is (again befittingly) more or less accurate. The can-do American seeks out cash value in practical life.Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Saunders Pierce, and John Dewey crafted the only indigenous philosophy that has so far been produced in America. Its roots are in Laplacean probability theory, Darwinian evolutionism, and Chauncey Wright's indeterminism. While James hoped to save a place for religion (if it works, go with it) and Pierce a place for God (he thought there had to be a designing intelligence to account for order), the pragmatic result is profoundly skeptical and secular. Neither Holmes nor Dewey thought that individuals imbedded in societies had any need of absolutes. Holmes said that people first decide on the basis of experience, then they deduce. Dewey said that people first behave commonsensically, then they rationalize.There is nothing as condensed as the above in Louis Menand's beautiful book on the ideas, personalities, and influence of Holmes, James, Pierce, and Dewey. I know of no clearer exposition of their ideas, and few biographers have made them come so alive. In particular, Menand's coverage of peripheral (but by no means insignificant) figures is very rich. He describes the development of graduate universities in America in detail from their autocratic beginnings to the institution of academic freedom as we know it today. University presidents, trustees, and administrators are presented luxuriously as the villains, and the professors gloriously as the heroes. Menand remarks with slight amazement that society bought the concept that professors were beholden to the public at large and not to the state or private university owners. He could have commented further on the fact that the concept of academic freedom has become virtually irrelevant in today's corporate research universities."It is a remarkable fact about the United States," Menand begins his book, "that it fought a civil war without undergoing a change in its form of government" (p. ix). This is a breathtaking fact, and I don't suppose Menand had any intent to explain it. "The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 142-143 [Access article in PDF] Wright, John P. and Paul Potter, editors. Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 298. Cloth, $72.00. The mind-body problem has a long history that begins well before Descartes made it extreme by presenting mind as unextended active thinking and (...) matter as unthinking passive extension. This absolute division was motivated in some part by the desire to present the soul as an entity that can survive the death of the body. This is difficult to maintain if the soul is merely the form or the vital force motivating a human body. But the advance of physiology has led more and more to the conclusion that the functions often attributed to the soul are actually carried out by the brain. Thinking may be as natural (and perhaps as determined) a function of the body as is digestion. And if digestion does not survive the death of the body, maybe thinking does not either.This collection of studies provides a detailed introduction to both medical and metaphysical views and theories concerning the relation of mind to body. In particular, the first article by Beate Gundert on Hippocratic Medicine sets the stage by showing that "mind and body in the Hippocratic writings, while distinguished empirically by being related to different types of phenomena, are both ultimately accounted for by the same explanatory model: Human nature (physis), which embraces the totality of bodily structures, physiological processes, and psychic events" (35). T. M. Robinson shows that Plato admits of no solution as to how mind and body interact, and Philip J. van der Eijk argues that "to detach the essence of man completely from his physical make-up would run counter to Aristotle's biological approach to man as a natural living being, the ultimate implication of his view on the divinity of nous is that the fullest realization of what it is to be a human being is to go beyond the limits of corporeality and mortality, and to become, if only temporarily, a god" (77). Heinrich von Staden covers Epicurus, Herophilus, Erasistratus, the Stoics, and Galen, concluding that "The discovery of the nerves entailed the first significant erosion of the vast territory ruled by the soul in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, an erosion accompanied by an expansion of the rule of 'nature,' visible not only in medicine, but also in philosophy" (116). Theo K. Heckel discusses Saint Paul's insistence upon the whole person, and Gareth Matthews shows that, prior to Descartes, Augustine presents "a radically new argument for mind-body dualism... an internalist argument... that proceeds from what, allegedly, the mind can know concerning itself to the conclusion that the mind is incorporeal" (145). Emily Michael discusses Pomponazzi's view that we know the immortality of the soul only by faith and the scholastic attempts to show that the soul is a substantial form. Guillaume Lamy, for example, criticized Descartes for having a soul only of thinking, whereas the soul must be of life. Steven Voss shows how at the end of his life, Descartes did discuss in detail how thinking affects the body, particularly in the management of health and the curing of disease. But Descartes does not solve the problem of how this interaction takes place. Thomas Lennon discusses the views of Bayle on Leibniz's monadic forces and Locke's fideism. And Francois Duchesneu continues the discussion of Stahl and Leibniz, to [End Page 142] conclude that "Leibniz attempts to discover the formal foundation of the organism, which he locates in the capacity of perception-appetition proper to the dominant monad" (235).John P. Wright gives an exposition of a very important distinction between Cartesian dualism and the functional dualism that came to dominate medical thought, that is, the question of how the brain and vital organs interact. Roselyn Rey carries this discussion on to the development of theories... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Who or What is the Preembryo?S.J. Richard A. McCormick (bio)IntroductionAlthough widely used by scientists, the term "preembryo" has raised some suspicions. Histopathologist Michael Jarmulowicz (1990), for example, asserts that the term was adopted by the American Fertility Society (AFS) and the Voluntary Licensing Authority (VLA) in Britain "as an exercise of linguistic engineering to make human embryo research more palatable to the general public."I cannot speak for the (...) VLA, but I can clarify that this was not the motive of the AFS. As a member of the AFS ethics committee that discussed and adopted this terminology, I know that our discussion was not tied to embryo research or moral issues. The term "preembryo" was adopted because the earliest stages of mammalian development primarily involve establishment of the nonembryonic trophoblast, rather than the formation of the embryo. As Clifford Grobstein (1988, p. 61), a distinguished basic scientist who also sat on the AFS committee notes:The scientific rationale for the term preembryo... is its greater accuracy in characterizing the initial phase of mammalian and human development.... The status implications of such a change in terminology were not at issue in the discussion.This is not to say that the moral status of the preembryo is not a concern worthy of independent consideration. It is an important question with significant practical implications, especially in the context of in vitro fertilization. At stake are issues such as: (1) what may be done to preembryos before transfer; (2) whether all preembryos must be transferred; and (3) what may be done to preembryos that are not transferred (Ethics Committee of the American Fertility Society (AFS) 1986, p. 29S). Furthermore, emergency treatment of rape cases may also depend on such a determination. [End Page 1]Cryopreservation, which entails freezing unused preembryos for possible later use, is one example of a procedure that raises issues associated with the moral status of the preembryo. Cryopreservation decreases the number of stimulated egg recovery cycles a woman must undergo and increases flexibility in transfer protocols. But thawing of the preembryos is not a completely benign process; significant numbers of the preembryos die in the process and injury cannot be excluded.In addition, down the road a year or so lies preimplantation genetic diagnosis, now being tested in several centers of reproductive research. This would involve the removal of one or more cells from a preembryo developing in vitro. The DNA from these cells would be studied and then only genetically normal preembryos would be transferred. With the growth in knowledge about single gene defects and the rapid advance of amplification technology, which allows gene visualization, it is not difficult to imagine scientists embarking on a variety of micromanipulations of the preembryo for the sake of gaining knowledge.Not all research with gametes involves preembryos, but clearly some experiments and procedures await resolution of the moral status of the preembryo. I contend in this paper that the moral status—and specifically the controversial issue of personhood—is related to attainment of developmental individuality (being the source of one individual). This contrasts with the view that holds that personhood occurs earlier, at the point of genetic uniqueness. I believe that an embryo that has developed to the point where it can be one individual and one individual only, differs in moral status from a preembryo that has not, even if in many cases we may choose to treat them similarly.The Scientific UnderpinningsTwo things must be kept in mind—and in a sense, in tension—in turning to science for help in assessing the status of the preembryo. First, science is not competent to decide the question of personhood or ensoulment. As the Catholic document, Declaration on Procured Abortion, which I will return to later, notes: "It is a philosophical problem" (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) 1974, p. 10, endnote 19). On the other hand, another Catholic document, Donum vitae(CDF 1987), notes that the conclusions of science provide a "valuable indication" for reason's deliberations about personhood. We might say that if science cannot decide the question of personhood, neither can it be decided without science.For my review of embryological science... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes on the Human Soul: Philosophy and the Demands of Christian DoctrineRichard A. WatsonC. F. Fowler. Descartes on the Human Soul: Philosophy and the Demands of Christian Doctrine. International Archives of the History of Ideas, 160. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. Pp. xiii + 438. Cloth, $168.00.As Defender of the Faith, René Descartes wrote his Meditations to fulfill the request of the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513 "to (...) support with rational demonstrations the Church's teaching on the immortality of the soul" (28). This allowed him to dedicate the Meditations to the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne in hopes of obtaining their approbation. The Faculty remained silent, but Descartes could interpret this as consent, although he removed from later editions the notice of approbation. What the Council asked for were demonstrations of the immortality of the soul and of the substantial union of the soul with the body.Mersenne thought the Meditiations were going to provide these demonstrations, so he included in the title of the first edition the promise to demonstrate the immortality of the soul, but in later editions Descartes changed this to a promise to demonstrate the distinction between the human soul and the body, or that the soul is an independent substance that is not destroyed by the death of the body, and so can be immortal. Independent substancehood does not prove that the soul is immortal, however, for Descartes agreed that God can destroy the soul at any time. This conclusion greatly bothered Mersenne and Arnauld. As for the absolute separation of the soul from the body, Descartes was criticized for supporting the Platonic doctrine of their absolute separation, making it impossible to demonstrate that the union between soul and body is substantial and not accidental. And "the central Christian doctrines of the Creation, Incarnation, Redemption, and Resurrection required a union of body and soul much more intimate than that of agent and instrument" (310). But all that Descartes's proof supports is the Platonic model of a sailor piloting a ship. Never mind that Descartes adamantly denies that the soul sits in the body thus—for the soul in union with the body feels the body as the sailor does not feel the ship—his friends and foes alike saw that the absolute difference of soul and body made their substantial union inexplicable. It also goes against the Aristotelian view of the Council of Vienne in 1311-1312 that "defined the rational soul as the forma corporis" (310). It is exactly this view that Descartes opposed by eliminating substantial forms from his philosophy.Arnauld warned Descartes about these problems, while Gassendi, Hobbes, and others attacked him. In response, Descartes expanded his views without altering them, and complained about being misunderstood. The Jesuit Father Bourdin's attacks hurt him most, for as he told Mersenne, this made him think that all the Jesuits (they stick together) were against him. This, Fowler argues, is why Descartes dedicated the Meditations to the Faculty of the Sorbonne, and not to the Jesuits.Fowler carefully presents the entire sweep of Descartes's ideas and arguments concerning the immortality of the soul and its union with the body. Descartes in fact did not manage to demonstrate either one. He did agree that of the three sorts of truths—those known by revelation alone, those known both by revelation and demonstration, and those known only by demonstration—these points about the soul belong in the middle category. But he never mentions immortality in the Meditations, and when Princess Elisabeth faces him with his inability to explain how the soul and body [End Page 120] can interact, he just says that we experience it. Gassendi asked him the same question, but Descartes ignored him. With other critics, he shifted the question into the first category of truths—it is a matter of revelation. This was not satisfactory either to his critics or to Descartes, for it had led Pompanazzi to materialism, and it led Descartes's first disciple Regius to say bluntly that metaphysics, and in particular Descartes's metaphysics, is irrelevant to the third category of truths, those of mechanics, physics, and medicine.Baillet calls... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene DescartesRichard A. WatsonAndrea Nye. The Princess and the Philosopher: Letters of Elisabeth of the Palatine to Rene Descartes. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xiii + 187. Cloth, $57.95. Paper, $18.95.Princess Elisabeth was an acute, persistent critic of Descartes's philosophy. Because he liked her and she was a princess, Descartes did not dismiss her (...) criticisms as he did those of Gassendi and Hobbes. How can an immaterial mind interact with a material body? How can God determine all our actions and yet give us free will? Elisabeth was dissatisfied with Descartes's answer that an all-powerful God can do anything even if we cannot understand how.Andrea Nye analyzes the correspondence between Elisabeth and Descartes to support the thesis that Elisabeth developed and defended a worldly philosophy of life in opposition to the unworldly rules Descartes offered for living a tranquil and happy life. Descartes said she should focus on the separation of the mind from the body to avoid disturbing the intellect with sensory matters. Think positively about such nice things as birds and flowers and not of bad things that happen to one. Descartes told Elisabeth that "there are no events so dreadful, nor so absolutely bad in the judgments of people, that a person of spirit cannot look on them with a bias that makes them appear favorable" (48). If we do our best to find out the right course of action and act accordingly, then even if the results are bad, we have no reason for remorse or recrimination, but can be happy that we have done the best we can. Descartes even says that a person who follows his rules can view everything that happens to him, even the worst, as though these events were taking place in a theatre, for in the end they do not impinge upon the ultimate happiness of one's immortal soul.Elisabeth, earnestly. sardonically, and sometimes with annoyance responds that this is perhaps possible for a single man of independent means with few civil and personal relationships, but for someone engaged in family affairs, royal politics, and social interaction with other human beings, Descartes's philosophy of life is both impossible and wrong. One never knows what is best; even if one did know, it is difficult to carry it out; and finally, if the results are bad, then one is after all responsible. One would be inhuman to deny fault, monstrous to deny moral responsibility. Above all, Elisabeth says, one should not view one's own life as theatre. One must be responsible for oneself and others.Nye casts this as a difference between Descartes's abstract and Elisabeth's particularist approaches to life, but also as a contrast between those who can live a disengaged life and those who cannot. Some of the amusement in Nye's perceptive discussions comes from her showing how Descartes's passions often run away with him, and how Elisabeth gently turns his own rules back onto him. [End Page 277]Nye's analyses of the correspondence are excellent, but she makes some mistakes about the lives of Descartes and Elisabeth. Nye explains Descartes's coolness by his having suffered from a "motherless infancy" (129), even speaking of "the mother's milk denied him as a child" and calling him an "orphan" (156), which he was not. His mother died thirteen months after his birth, but he had a wet nurse. Descartes may never have tasted his own mother's milk, but he was never deprived of nursing. Children were often sent to live with wet nurses for as long as four years, although Descartes is traditionally said to have been raised by his grandmother. In any event, such psychoanalyzing is off the mark.Nye also says that Descartes was asked by Queen Christina to write a ballet. She cites the wrong ballet and attributes a verse from the right ballet incorrectly, but beyond that, there is no evidence either that Descartes wrote verses for a ballet or that Christina asked him to.Then Nye speaks of Descartes's daughter Francine... (shrink)

Howard Callaway’s new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Society and Solitude is an invaluable contribution to both the primary and secondary literature on Emerson. Its contribution to the primary sources is its use of the original 1870 edition of Emerson’s text, though with modernized spellings to facilitate the reader’s understanding. Its contribution to the secondary literature consists in the scholarly apparatus of page-by-page annotations, an introduction, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Callaway’s Society and Solitude is a (...) worthy companion to his earlier edition of Emerson’s The Conduct of Life. (shrink)

Howard Callaway's new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Society and Solitude is an invaluable contribution to both the primary and secondary literature on Emerson. Its contribution to the primary sources is its use of the original 1870 edition of Emerson's text, though with modernized spellings to facilitate the reader's understanding. Its contribution to the secondary literature consists in the scholarly apparatus of page-by-page annotations, an introduction, a chronology, a bibliography, and an index. Callaway's Society and Solitude is a (...) worthy companion to his earlier edition of Emerson's The Conduct of Life. (shrink)

Peter Trawny’s Heidegger: A Critical Introduction examines the various phases of the philosopher’s thought, with special attention to questions of politics and antisemitism. This review sums up the book and discusses the relevance of Heidegger today for analytic philosophy, Jewish thought, and political philosophy.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

You'd never know Athens was locked in a life-or-death struggle from the tranquil and leisurely philosophical discussion that unfolds through the pages of the Republic...Plato's masterpiece continues to inform our questions and our thinking when it comes to being, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, community, the soul, and more." -From Dr. Littlejohn's Introduction. On the way back from a festival, Socrates is waylaid by some friends who compel him to go home with them. There he and his companions engage in a (...) long discussion about whether it is worse to suffer evil or to commit it. Far from being dry or abstract, Plato's dialogue is full of practical questions about the nature of justice, education, power, and virtue, and it ends with two of the most vivid myths ever devised by man. This Canon Classic is translated clearly by Benjamin Jowett, and unlike all other works of philosophy, it's actually fun to read. The Canon Classics series presents the most definitive works of Western literature in a colorful, well-crafted, and affordable way. Unlike many other thrift editions, our classics are printed on thicker text stock and feature individualized designs that prioritize readability by means of proper margins, leading, characters per line, font, trim size, etc. Each book's materials and layout combine to make the classics a simple and striking addition to classrooms and homes, ideal for introducing the best of literary culture and human experience to the next generation. This Worldview Edition features an introduction divided into sections on The World Around, About the Author, What Other Notables Said, Setting, Characters, & Plot Summary, Worldview Analysis, 21 Significant Questions & Answers, and Further Discussion & Review. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists by Chris VoparilRichard Kenneth AtkinsChris Voparil. Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 377. Hardback, $74.00.A house divided cannot stand, or so Jesus tells us. As far as I can ascertain, Jesus was right about many things (his followers perhaps less so). Accordingly, that the house early pragmatists built, (...) with all of its subsequent divisions and internecine controversies, still stands is something of an anomaly. Perhaps it is explained by the fact that pragmatists have also been blessed by peacemakers, among whom Chris Voparil is to be numbered. In this carefully researched and clearly written book, Voparil examines the ties that bind Richard Rorty to his pragmatist predecessors: C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams. The hope animating Voparil's book is that with a closer look at these ties he "can unsettle the current map of opposing pragmatist camps by uncovering previously obscured or overlooked alignments and common aims" (259). He argues that Rorty did not misunderstand his predecessors but "consciously radicalized" (280) their positions.The book is five chapters long, with each of the chapters devoted to Rorty's relationship to one of the five aforementioned classical pragmatists, in that order. There are also substantial introductory and concluding chapters. The more controversy-laden chapters are the first (on Peirce) and third (on Dewey). As Voparil explains in chapter 1, Peirceans are wary of Rorty's apparent antirealism. But to soothe the worries of wary Peirceans, Voparil argues that commitments to realism can be found in Rorty's early and later works and that some of the more outrageous statements from the middle period are exaggerations that are ultimately qualified, if not disavowed. The Peirce scholar may wish that Voparil had done more to distinguish different varieties of realism found in Peirce's writings, as Robert Lane has done in his recent Peirce on Realism and Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), but the crux of Voparil's argument is persuasive enough. Rorty did not deny that there is a world that affects us and that there is such a thing as "getting it right," even if he thought that varieties of representationalism about mental states and the correspondence theory of truth are not topics worthy of further discussion. Voparil does not [End Page 530] cite the footnote, but Rorty states the matter sufficiently clearly when he writes, "I think that [Nelson] Goodman's trope of 'many worlds' is misleading and that we need not go beyond the more straightforward 'many descriptions of the same world' (provided one does not ask 'And what world is that?'). But his point that there is no way to compare descriptions of the world in respect of adequacy seems to me crucial, and in the first two chapters of this book [Ways of Worldmaking] he makes it very vividly" (Consequences of Pragmatism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982], xlvii). Rorty's point is that talk of "the world" can play no interesting explanatory role in our accounts of truth, representation, and the like just because we cannot now (or at any given future time) claim to have the final vocabulary to talk about the world. There is an interesting parallelism to Peirce's theory of induction here that Voparil does not explore. On Peirce's theory of statistical induction, we cannot claim at any given time that we have ascertained the real frequencies in nature, but we can be assured that in the long run we will eventually approximate them. Similarly, for Rorty, we cannot claim at any given time that we have the final vocabulary for describing the world, but that does not prohibit us from claiming that we can improve our descriptions of the world, where improvement is relative to some purpose. As Rorty concedes, the descriptions of nature that emerge in the modern period are better descriptions than those of the Aristotelian physics, given various purposes that we have (Consequences of Pragmatism, 191).Turning to chapter 3, Rorty's misappropriations and misrepresentations of Dewey's views have peeved Dewey scholars. In particular, Rorty... (shrink)

We describe the important role that the conjectures and questions posed at the end of the two editions of Gerald Sacks's Degrees of Unsolvability have had in the development of recursion theory over the past thirty years.

In this first volume of The Sylvan Jungle, the editors present a scholarly edition of the first chapter, "Exploring Meinong's Jungle," of Richard Routley's 1000-plus page book, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond. Going against the Quinean orthodoxy, Routley’s aim was to support Meinong’s idea that we can truthfully refer to non-existent and even impossible objects, like Superman, unicorns and the round-square cupola on Berkeley College. The tools of non-classical logic at Routley’s disposal enabled him to update Meinong’s project (...) for a new generation. This volume begins with an Introduction from Dominic Hyde, “The ‘Jungle Book’ in Context,” an essay that situates Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond historically. We provide the original Preface by Routley, followed by Chapter 1: “Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond.” In Chapter 2, Nicholas Griffin argues that Sylvan’s project was insufficiently radical with his essay, “Why the Original Theory of Items Didn’t Go Far Enough.” Sylvan revisits his position from this time in Chapter 3, with his article, “Re-Exploring Item-Theory.” Filippo Casati, who has worked in the Routley Archives then takes up the question of the future of Sylvan’s research program in his essay, “The Future Perfect of Exploring Meinong’s Jungle.” Iconic and iconoclastic Australian philosopher Richard Routley published Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond in 1980. This work has fallen out of print, yet without great fanfare it has influenced two generations of philosophers and logicians. (shrink)

The De Malo represents some of St. Thomas Aquinas' most mature thinking on goodness, badness, and human agency. Together with the second part of the Summa Theologiae, it is one of his most sustained contributions to moral philosophy and theology. Aquinas examines the full range of questions associated with evil: its origin, its nature, its variety, its relation to good, and its compatibility with the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. This edition offers the Leonine Commission's authoritative edition of the (...) Latin text with a new, clear, and readable English translation by Richard Regan with an extensive introduction and notes by Brian Davies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Building a FoundationRichard KeidanA guiding principle of Judaism is "tzedakah," which translates as charity but actually means righteousness, reflecting that tzedakah is an obligation, not a choice. This concept of social justice was taught to me at home, at school and at synagogue. I gave to charities and did occasional charitable work. As my parents had taught me, I taught my own children the spirit of giving, but it (...) did come from a place of obligation, not passion. I have since come to learn that there is a world of difference between just fulfilling our obligations to each other and letting them guide the kind of person we become.It is ironic how the process of becoming a doctor—a person society expects to be selfless— requires total self-absorption. Think about it. I was trained to compete with my classmates in order to be accepted to the best university, medical school, residency, and then fellowship. I spent more than one hundred hours each week in the hospital during surgical residency. If I had free time, I wanted to do what I wanted to do. I was so focused on the end result that I had little time to think of others, let alone to ponder the inequities of the world.Several events led to the awakening of my conscience. One was an opportunity to go to Ethiopia and perform a couple weeks' worth of cancer surgery through Mother Teresa's Clinic. Quite frankly, I went because it seemed like an exciting adventure. However, I was completely overwhelmed by the experience. The conditions were abominable. The stories of each of my patients were heart-wrenching. I encountered a 14-year-old boy, the same age as my son, who had a tumor 15 cm in thickness wrapped around his neck. In order to hide the tumor he wore a scarf, but this still did not prevent him from being shunned. He traveled by himself for several days on a bus to reach the clinic. He had no one to advocate on his behalf, was unable to speak the local language, had never been outside his village (let alone in a motor vehicle), and he fearlessly underwent major surgery all by himself.The inequalities in health care compared to my suburban hospital were unfathomable. I cried every night in my hotel room. There seemed to be no solution to this situation. Soon after I returned home, Ethiopia became a distant memory. The experience cut me to the bone, but for whatever reason, I did not rally. I did not see myself as part of the solution. It took an entirely different international experience to open my eyes.There is a saying, "One goes to the Himalayas to see the mountains, but returns for the culture." In 1982, on a sabbatical from my surgical training, I went to Nepal to see the Himalayas, but fell in love with the people. Living in the most basic shelters, eating the most basic diets, with no access to clean water or toilets and little access to health care or education, the people seemed happy. I was invited into their homes and lives, slept on their straw mats, ate their rice and drank their tea. Their spirit and sense of contentment drew me back over the years 15 times. Nepal became a sanctuary for me, a place that gave me time to reflect upon what is truly important, a place that provided energy and inspiration for me. Its public health and education needs were apparent to me, but again, I felt sympathy for my Nepali friends; I did not see that I could—and must—help.It took a chance meeting to change that. Two years ago, I was on an exploratory trek on the Great Himalayan Trail in the Kanchenjunga region of Nepal. Namgyal was our sirdar (head sherpa guide), short in stature, but a giant of a man. Lacking a formal education, but very bright and [End Page 84] motivated, he rose through the ranks from porter all the way to lead sherpa of Everest Expeditions. He had reached the summit of Everest ten times by the age of thirty. He led... (shrink)

Drawing on drafts and other material from the Harvey Sacks archive this paper examines the development of one of the defining papers of Conversation Analysis, _A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation_ (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). The discussion examines four drafts of the paper along with correspondence between the authors and with William Bright, the editor of the journal _Language_ where it was to be published. The four drafts trace the development of the paper from a (...) 13-page draft to the final 106-page final draft submitted to the journal. By exploring the drafts as they evolved the discussion highlights the development of the central ideas in the paper, the distinctive style of the paper as it is revised, the changes of authorship, and the role of the editor of _Language,_ William Bright, in helping to shape the paper through his own detailed reviews. (shrink)

Several scholars and many religiously conservative thinkers have recently charged that Hitler’s ideas about race and racial struggle derived from the theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), either directly or through intermediate sources. So, for example, the historian Richard Weikart, in his book From Darwin to Hitler , maintains: “No matter how crooked the road was from Darwin to Hitler, clearly Darwinism and eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially for the Nazi stress on expansion, war, racial struggle, and (...) racial extermination.” In a subsequent book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Weikart argues that Darwin’s “evolutionary ethics drove him [Hitler] to engage in behavior that the rest of us consider abominable.” Other critics have also attempted to forge a strong link between Darwin’s theory and Hitler’s biological notions. In the 2008 film “Expelled,” a documentary defense of Intelligent Design, the Princeton trained philosopher David Berlinski, in conversation with Weikart, confidently asserts: “If you open Mein Kampf and read it, especially if you can read it in German, the correspondence between Darwinian ideas and Nazi ideas just leaps from the page.” John Gray, former professor at the London School of Economics, does allow that Hitler’s Darwinism was “vulgar.” Hannah Arendt also appears to have endorsed the connection when she declared: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.” Put “Darwin” and “Hitler” in a search engine and several million hits will be returned, most from religiously and politically conservative websites, articles, and books. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking Through the Body, Educating for the Humanities:A Plea for SomaestheticsRichard Shusterman (bio)IWhat are the humanities, and how should they be cultivated? With respect to this crucial question, opinions differ as to how widely the humanities should be construed and pursued. Initially connoting the study of Greek and Roman classics, the concept now more generally covers arts and letters, history, and philosophy.1 But does it also include the social (...) sciences, which are often distinguished from the humanities and grouped as a separate academic division with greater pretensions to scientific status? And should our pursuit of humanistic study be concentrated on the traditional methods and topics of high culture that give the humanities an authoritative aura of established nobility, or should it extend to new and funkier forms of interdisciplinary research such as popular culture or race and gender studies?Despite such questions and controversy, it is clear (even from etymology) that the meaning of the humanities essentially relates to our human condition and our efforts to perfect our humanity and its expression. But what, then, does it mean to be human? I cannot pretend here to adequately answer such a complex and difficult question. I will, however, argue that because the body is an essential and valuable dimension of our humanity, it should be recognized as a crucial topic of humanistic study and experiential learning. Though the truth of this thesis should be obvious, it goes sharply against the grain of our traditional understanding of the humanities. One striking example of such antisomatic bias is the very term that German speakers use to designate the humanities, "Geisteswissenschaften," whose literal English translation would be "spiritual (or mental) sciences," as contrasted to the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) that treat physical life, [End Page 1] with which, of course, the body is clearly linked. Hence, given the pervasive physical/spiritual opposition, the body is essentially omitted or marginalized in our conception of humanistic studies.2We humanist intellectuals generally take the body for granted because we are so passionately interested in the life of the mind and the creative arts that express our human spirit. But the body is not only an essential dimension of our humanity, it is also the basic instrument of all human performance, our tool of tools, a necessity for all our perception, action, and even thought. Just as skilled builders need expert knowledge of their tools, so we need better somatic knowledge to improve our understanding and performance in the arts and human sciences and to advance our mastery in the highest art of all—that of perfecting our humanity and living better lives. We need to think more carefully through the body in order to cultivate ourselves and edify our students because true humanity is not a mere genetic given but an educational achievement in which body, mind, and culture must be thoroughly integrated. To pursue this project of somatic inquiry, I have been working on an interdisciplinary field called somaesthetics, whose disciplinary connections extend also beyond the humanities to the biological, cognitive, and health sciences, which I see as valuable allies for humanistic research.3Somaesthetics, roughly defined, concerns the body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aisthesis) and creative self-fashioning. As an ameliorative discipline of both theory and practice, it aims to enrich not only our abstract, discursive knowledge of the body but also our lived somatic experience and performance; it seeks to enhance the meaning, understanding, efficacy, and beauty of our movements and of the environments to which our movements contribute and from which they also draw their energies and significance. Somaesthetics, therefore, involves a wide range of knowledge forms and disciplines that structure such somatic care or can improve it. Recognizing that body, mind, and culture are deeply codependent, somaesthetics comprises an interdisciplinary research program to integrate their study. Mental life relies on somatic experience and cannot be wholly separated from bodily processes, even if it cannot be wholly reduced to them. We think and feel with our bodies, especially with the body parts that constitute the brain and nervous system. Our bodies are likewise affected by mental life, as when certain thoughts bring a blush to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 369-396 [Access article in PDF] Worlds or Words Apart?The Consequences of Pragmatism for Literary Studies:An Interview with Richard Rorty Richard Rorty, with E. P. Ragg ER: I WANTED TO ASK YOU first about holism. Clearly holism doesn't just mean being interdisciplinary. Nor, as you argue in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is it merely a question of antifoundationalist polemic. Rather, you (...) say it marks "a distrust of the whole epistemological enterprise." 1 Could you explain what you mean by that?RR: If you weren't some kind of foundationalist you wouldn't bother to get into epistemology. Epistemology only looks attractive if you think that there is a topic called knowledge whose nature can be studied. The idea is that once you have learned its nature, you might get more of it than you had before. Only someone who thinks that knowledge has foundations located in sense perception, or pure reason, or divine revelation, or something, would take the idea of studying knowledge, its nature and limits, seriously. I think of holism as just the view that people change their beliefs in such a way as to achieve coherence with their other beliefs, to bring their beliefs and desires into some sort of equilibrium—and that that is about all there is to be said about the quest for knowledge. There are no rules for which beliefs you sacrifice in order to accommodate other beliefs, or which desires you change to accommodate changed beliefs. Because there aren't any rules, there aren't any methods you can study in order to improve the way you achieve equilibrium. The whole idea of studying how belief is changed is pretty hopeless. It's just too holistic a process to be an appropriate topic of study. [End Page 369]ER: Holism is obviously a natural corollary of pragmatism because pragmatists urge bringing as many different useful vocabularies to discussion as we can. This reminds me of your definition of "literariness." In Contingency, irony, and solidarity you describe literary skill as the ability to effect "surprising gestalt switches by making smooth rapid transitions from one terminology to another." 2 Would it be fair to say, then, that thinking holistically is, to some degree, literary?RR: No, I don't think so. It would be more appropriate to say thinking holistically, in the sense of not being limited to a given context or disciplinary framework, is a matter of thinking imaginatively. Politicians and theologians and engineers think imaginatively just as much as literary people do. To call it literary would be unduly to privilege literature.ER: Would you say that, as a writer, your own work has been treated holistically: first in the sense that your texts are seen as a growing body of thought—that is, that there is a difference between the writer of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and the author of Contingency, irony, and solidarity—and, second, in the sense that people have thought holistically about your ideas, have brought them to bear on literature, philosophy, social science, the very demarcations you want to transcend?RR: I think that the stuff I do is more interesting to people outside of philosophy than those inside it. This is an example of the same phenomenon that led Kuhn to be much more read by people outside the hard sciences than by people within them. My stuff, like Kuhn's, debunks certain views that various earlier philosophers, especially the positivists, had tried to impose on the culture. My readers are people who are looking for a way out from the view they absorbed, without much liking it, when they were young. People inside of philosophy, however, often regard all this debunking as endangering the problems to the solution of which they have devoted their lives. They do not want the problems dissolved, because that would dissolve their solutions as well. So they welcome it less than do outsiders.ER: One of the markers of your... (shrink)