America, and the postmodern West in particular, are experiencing a moral and intellectual crisis, according to E. Robert Statham, Jr. In The Constitution of Public Philosophy, Statham argues that Walter Lippman was correct in locating this crisis in the impoverished nature of public philosophy, and he attempts to constitute a role for reason in contemporary America. Statham suggests that the negative rule of law via a written constitution requires the positive rule of reason, or political philosophy, (...) in order to flourish. (shrink)

The crisis of western civilization is a crisis of public philosophy. This is the charge of Public Philosophy and Political Science, a stunning new collection of essays edited by E. Robert Statham Jr. Vividly cataloging the decay of the moral and intellectual foundations of civic liberty, the book portrays a generation of Americans alienated from institutions built on public philosophy. The work exposes the failure of America's political scientists to acknowledge and understand this alarming crisis in the American (...) body politic. The distinguished contributors examine the evolution of public philosophy; the inextricable relationship between politics and philosophy; and the interplay between public philosophy, the constitution, natural law, and government. They reveal the dire threat to deliberative democracy and the fundamental order of constitutional society posed by public philosophy's waning power to refine, cultivate, and civilize. The work is an indictment of a society which has discarded a way of life rooted in natural law, democracy and the traditions of civility; and is a denunciation of an educated elite that has divorced itself from the standards upon which public philosophy rests. It is essential reading for philosophers and political and social scientists seeking to resurrect the standards of American public life. (shrink)

abstract ‘Time is money’, Benjamin Franklin's ‘Poor Richard’ tells us. But instead of converting time expenditures into monetary equivalents, it makes more sense in many cases to convert money into temporal equivalents. The difficulty in putting a monetary value on time in unpaid household labour, when adjusting the National Accounts, points to the problems of the first approach. The advantages of the latter approach are illustrated by the Swedish system of specifying criminal fines in terms of the number of days (...) the offender would have to work to pay them off. (shrink)

I here present some doubts about whether Mandik’s (2010) proposed intermediacy and recurrence constraints are necessary and sufficient for agentive experience. I also argue that in order to vindicate the conclusion that agentive experience is an exclusively perceptual phenomenon (Prinz, 2007), it is not enough to show that the predictions produced by forward models of planned motor actions are conveyed by mock sensory signals. Rather, it must also be shown that the outputs of “comparator” mechanisms that compare these predictions against (...) actual sensory feedback are also coded in a perceptual representational format. (shrink)

This paper is an outline of a semester long experiment with students in a bioethics course at the College of Staten Island. The experiment traces the complexities students face in moral reasoning. The author recounts the specific moral questions that arose amidst efforts to construct a collaborative list of definitions for terms of moral justification. The project contributed to students’ general knowledge of bioethics and its principles of judgments. The intensive engagement with the principles of moral justification allowed students to (...) grapple with complex moral issues, to research literature for basic terms, and to approach philosophical arguments across the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The sciences and popular views generally consider matter from the bottom up, that is, as the least common denominator underlying all of its various forms and realizations. In Rahner sensibility is matter looked at from the top down, that is, with a view to the highest realization of matter in human beings, and in Christ. In Whitehead creativity is matter, not inert or static but spontaneous and active, and creativity is matter viewed in light of its highest realizations in humans (...) and in God. So, in Rahner and in Whitehead, matter is viewed in much the same way, called sensibility in Rahner, and creativity in Whitehead, and defined in terms of its actualization in human nature. (shrink)

The mystery of person is so deep that philosophers should welcome insights into that mystery from wherever they come. Literature, theater, film and psychology are a few sources that may provide help. The study of previous philosophies of person can be especially helpful. At the turn of the century there were numerous philosophical idealisms in this country. One was personal idealism and one of the most highly respected proponents of personal idealism was George Holmes Howison. If the idealists of the (...) latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century were compared to the pragmatists, naturalists and agnostics of that time the idealists would represent a more conservative position. Howison, whose published philosophical writings span the period from 1861 to 1916, constructed an idealism that is post-Kantian: impressed and influenced by Kant, Howison rejected what he judged to be Kant’s errors. As a reaction to and rejection of Kant’s vision, Howison’s philosophy, which in the history of philosophy is a relatively rare blend of the personalistic and the idealistic, is interesting. (shrink)

Following two introductory sections which deal with the search for meaning and the model of film as a form of probing, I argue that Bergman deals with a number of important philosophical issues within his film corpus. A summary account of the vision which emerges from this corpus is sketched, followed by an analysis of the central role of the artist in society as Bergman conceives it.

Critics’ praise of Woody Allen as an artist is increasing. No other comedian includes within his humour so many references to God. Philosophers interested in contemporary culture should take Allen’s comedy seriously. Accepting Albert Camus’s vision of reality, Allen has been artistically handling the absurdity of reality by use of humour. Through comedies, Allen’s films deal with important questions. His finest film may contain an argument for God.

The concept of person is a primary interest of the contemporary intellectual world. Modern literature, films, theater, theology and philosophy focus their attention increasingly on the meaning of person. The current interests of philosophers can activate and direct their reading of the history of philosophy. The rereading of the history of philosophy with a new interest can lead to new insights and discoveries. Through these insights and discoveries, philosophies of the past come to life in the present and influence the (...) future. One of the tasks of contemporary philosophers is to read and examine philosophies of the past under the light of the current interest in person so that errors of previous philosophers might be avoided and insights of previous philosophers might be assimilated. The rereading, examination and exposition of past philosophers is and must be a community project. Both the vastness of philosophical literature and importance of dialogue, if progress is to be made, necessitate that the project be undertaken by many. This exposition of William Torrey Harris’ philosophy is offered as part of the project. Though Harris’ philosophy has been identified as a personalism, it has not received adequate study as a personalism nor has Harris’ concept of person been sufficiently examined. Of Harris, Nicholas Murray Butler wrote. (shrink)

Hegel and Nietzsche stood opposed to the monastic tradition which they saw as based upon a denial of the intrinsic value of this life. Both sought to install eternity in this life and not seek for it in an afterlife. Central to both, and contrary to common caricatures of Hegel, is the notion of the heart, the aspect of total subjective participation, which is the locus of a fully concrete reason understood in Hegel’s sense. It is also central to Dostoevsky’s (...) Brothers Karamazov where the heart of Fr. Zosima, while yet rooted in the encompassing eternality of God, overcomes the contempt for the earth of Fr. Ferapont and leads Alyosha to embrace his vocation in the world. Hegel developed the fundamental categories that allows us to comprehend the situation. (shrink)

Among moralists and social critics of several stripes, it is not enough that the right thing be done: they also insist that it be done, and be seen to be done, for the right reasons. They are anxious to know whether we are sending food to starving Africans out of genuinely altruistic concern, or merely to clear domestic commodity markets, for one particularly topical example. Or, for another example, critics of the Brandt Commission’s plea for increased foreign aid more generally (...) say, in stinging rebuke: ‘Many of those who support the proposal... do so out of genuine humanitarian concern about... poverty. But it is doubtful whether this is the main concern of its authors, and it certainly is not their only concern.... They are, instead, primarily concerned with the preservation of the existing world economic order.’What is common to all such cases is an attempt at motive differentiation. Any particular piece of behavior might have sprung from any of a number of different underlying motives; commentators want to know which was the real motive. Here I shall show that this characteristic quest for motive differentiation is misguided. In most of the standard social situations, it makes no material difference to agents’ actions whether they act from one sort of motive or another. And in such circumstances, pressing the motivational issue will usually lead only to mischief, of both a pragmatic and a moral sort. (shrink)

I used to think that we should expect of presidents of philosophical associations that they offer us a few pithy comments on the nature of the universe.

PLATO'S WAS a peculiar genius unmatched by any in the entire history of Western thought. He understood well the central play in human experience between appearance, which, ambiguously poised, is a vehicle of both revelation and concealment, and the reality which appearance both conceals and reveals--or better, which appearance conceals as it reveals. The grounds of this play lie both in the character of human structure and in the character of the whole within which that structure functions. Grounded in the (...) unconscious of physiology, the field of human awareness rises by stages from an immediately given, biologically-based circle of sensory awareness, through a culturally mediated sphere of different modes of situating the sensory surface within the greater whole, to a basic orientation toward that all-encompassing whole, which affords us the distance needed to grasp both the orientation itself as orientation and the stages preceding it. Ordinary life is locked into a struggle between the biologically grounded desires and the peculiarities of cultural mediation that seek to channel those desires. Ordinary life exists in relation to a kind of functional surface of things which it co-constitutes with those things in a sort of "dashboard knowledge," knowing what to push and pull and turn to get the desired responses. Sophists continually arise as masters of appearance, often taking themselves, especially if they think they have the sanction of the gods, as genuine lovers of wisdom. (shrink)

SENSING PRESENTS TO US INDIVIDUALS. But, though directing us practically, the way it presents them misleads us systematically about the nature of the individuals with which we have our practical dealings and poses serious questions about the status of the universals we use to describe them. We are all quite aware of the consequences in the practical order of unsettling the question of universals. The notion of capacity can overcome the problems involved.

THE PLATONIC DIALOGUES are not treatises in disguise. They are protreptic and proleptic instruments, positioning the reader dispositionally and providing hints for the work of completing the direction of thought by attending to "the things themselves," the phenomena to which human beings, properly attuned, have native access. Plato, I would contend, is a protophenomenologist whose dialogues yield significant coherent results when approached from that point of view.

IN A PREVIOUS ARTICLE I argued that Plato’s Line of Knowledge in the middle of his Republic taught a “pedagogy of complete reflection.” What I intend to show in this article is that the general lines of that “complete reflection” indicated in the Republic are brought down to the everyday in the Theaetetus where we are invited, among other things, to reflect upon what is involved in the fact that we are reading the dialogue in our lifeworld.

Today, in an epoch of the proclamation of radical incommunicability between ethnic groups, between the sexes, and between individuals sunk in the privacy of their own gratifications, supported by a theoretical rejection of principles or universals of any sort, I want to explore the possibility of "taking the universal viewpoint" and thus finding a way out of a situation of radical cultural disintegration without succumbing to one or the other mode of intellectual imperialism, theological or otherwise. I will attempt to (...) do so by attending to what, I would claim, is the most obvious and showing what is implicit in recognizing that. In focusing our attention, let us attempt to set aside for the time being everything we might think we know from other sources, science included: bracket temporarily all theories, all dogmas, all preferences, all commitments other than that of paying attention to what presents itself to careful attention here and now. Nothing should intrude except the evidence present to us, since, I would claim, that evidence is presupposed in appealing to these other factors, including arguments for the "theory-ladenness" of evidence. (shrink)

As a response to Diane Vaughan’s controversial work on the NASA Challenger Disaster, this article opposes the conclusion that NASA’s decision to launch the space shuttle was an inevitable outcome of techno-bureaucratic culture and risky technology. Instead, the argument developed in this article is that NASA did not prioritize safety, both in their selection of shuttle-parts and their decision to launch under sub-optimal weather conditions. This article further suggests that the “mistake” language employed by Vaughan and others is inappropriate insofar (...) as it obscures the responsibility of individuals within the organization and trivializes the loss of life and severity of the disaster. Contra to the conclusions of Vaughan’s casework, this article reveals various ethical transgressions on the side of NASA and its affiliates; from its decision to use poorly designed O-rings, to withholding crucial engineering assessments from the shuttle-crew, this article points out that NASA did not succumb to a pre-destined fate, but, rather, created its own. (shrink)