Recent scholarship has inquired into the socio-historical, discursive genesis of trauma. Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject, however, seeks what has not been actualized in trauma studies - that is, how the necessity and unassailable intensity of trauma is fastened to its historical emergence. We must ask not only what trauma means for the individual person's biography, but also what it means to be the historical subject of trauma. In other words, how does being human in this current (...) period of history implicate one's lived possibilities that are threatened, and perhaps framed, through trauma? Foucauldian sensibilities inform a critical and structural analysis that is hermeneutically grounded. Drawing on the history of ideas and on Lacan's work in particular, John L. Roberts argues that what we mean by trauma has developed over time, and that it is intimately tied with an ontology of the subject; that is to say, what it is to be, and means to be human. He argues that modern subjectivity - as articulated by Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan - is structurally traumatic, founded in its finitude as self-withdrawal in time, its temporal self-absence becoming the very conditions for agency, truth and knowledge. The book also argues that this fractured temporal horizon - as an effect of an interrupting Otherness or alterity - is obscured through the discourses and technologies of the psy-disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy). Consideration is given to social, political, and economic consequences of this concealment. Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject will be of enduring interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as scholars of philosophy and cultural studies. (shrink)

We examined the public interest reports of General Motors from 1971 to 1990 and presented the contents thereof herein. The principal areas disclosed by GM during those years that are discussed in this paper were minorities, women, and employment issues, energy and the environment, international operations, automotive safety, and philanthropic activity. The purpose of this study was to examine the public interest report as a vehicle through which a firm might disclose information in the public interest. We concluded that there (...) were at least three principal forces driving GM's disclosures. They included public attention focused on, potential costs associated with, and the relative subjectivity of an issue.In reading their public interest reports, it became clear that GM is socially responsive in matters of public interest. Whether they are socially responsible is a judgment not within the scope of this study. However, we do not preclude the possibility that the report may serve as a vehicle which would build a certain momentum in public responsibility, and thus partially drive decisions made by management in social issues. (shrink)

Nozick analyzes fundamental issues, such as the identity of the self, knowledge and skepticism, free will, the foundations of ethics, and the meaning of life.

From the ferment of recent debates about the intellectual virtues, Roberts and Wood develop an approach they call 'regulative epistemology', exploring the connection between knowledge and intellectual virtue. In the course of their argument they analyse particular virtues of intellectual life - such as courage, generosity, and humility - in detail.

It is a near truism of philosophy of language that sentences are prior to words--that they are the only things that fundamentally have meaning. Robert's Stainton's study interrogates this idea, drawing on a wide body of evidence to argue that speakers can and do use mere words, not sentences, to communicate complex thoughts.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Democracy in an Uncertain World:Expertise as a Provisional Response to VulnerabilityRobert Smid (bio)In the final chapter of American Immanence, Michael Hogue writes that "[r]ather than asking the foundationalist question of what epistemology is needed to ground or justify democracy, the pragmatist asks what epistemology democracy entails. What 'way of knowing' follows from, or is appropriate to, democracy as an associational ethos of vulnerable life?"1 While Hogue and I have (...) explored similar themes in our research on the promises and perils of democracy, this statement identifies a key difference in our respective approaches that has significant implications for the role that democracy can and should play in inquiry as well as for its potential to revolutionize civilization as we know it in the Anthropocene.In what follows, I raise three interrelated points that interrogate that difference. The first pertains to the role of foundations, provisional or otherwise, in Hogue's work, and results in a challenge to the special status seemingly given to democracy and a proposed inversion of the relation he poses between epistemology and democracy. The second pertains to the role of education in a democracy. This is a dimension of traditional pragmatist discourse on democracy that is conspicuously absent in Hogue's book, yet one that has significant implications for his argument. In this section, I will draw out the Deweyan strains of that discourse that appear to inform Hogue's work and contrast them with a Peircean take that yields notably different outcomes. The third point addresses the relation between democracy and sovereignty, a relation that Hogue explicitly eschews but that I will argue maintains some validity within democratic discourse, albeit in a more modest and provisional form. Finally, I draw these three points together in a conclusion that affirms much of Hogue's argument—including the profound vulnerability manifested by the Anthropocene and the need for more resilient forms of associated life—but assert that democracy is no less vulnerable than any other aspect of our uncertain world and therefore cannot be expected to possess within itself all that is necessary for its ongoing development. Building on the inversion of democracy and epistemology in the first section, the constitutive role of education in a [End Page 30] democracy as laid out in the second section, and the argument for a mitigated sovereignty in the third section, I argue that professional expertise provides an acceptable and necessary default when democratic structures fail.I. Provisional FoundationsAs a theopolitics rooted in religious naturalism, Hogue's understanding of democracy is one that is "embodied, relational, and vulnerable."2 That is, knowledge, meaning, and value all emerge out of and are conditioned by their social context, and shift according to the interests and needs of those who lay claim to them. Accordingly, Hogue's argument for democracy is that it is the way of life that allows for the broadest possible participation in such constructions, and which responds most effectively to the conditions of uncertainty and vulnerability surrounding them. It comes as no surprise, then, that his account of democracy is antifoundational, recognizing not only that all inquiry begins in medias res, but also that it emerges from a wide variety of media and that, while one goal of democratic discourse may be to chart a coherent path forward, both the media and the proposed paths are subject to change at any moment. Such antifoundationalism is a fairly standard commitment in pragmatist and process discourse, and thus relatively uncontroversial in its own right. It is worth noting, however, that being committed to antifoundationalism and actually being antifoundationalist in practice are often two very different things, our best efforts to the contrary notwithstanding.It is clear from Hogue's book that he resists any foundationalist epistemology, opting instead to derive his epistemology from democratic practice. As noted above, he asks "[w]hat 'way of knowing' follows from, or is appropriate to, democracy as an associational ethos of vulnerable life?"3 While it is possible that there is one epistemology that is best suited to democracy understood in this way, that epistemology would not, by his account, stand on its own foundation but be contingent on one... (shrink)

Winner of the 1975 National Book Award, this brilliant and widely acclaimed book is a powerful philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age--liberal, socialist, and conservative.

In this book, Robert Sokolowski argues that being a person means to be involved with truth. He shows that human reason is established by syntactic composition in language, pictures, and actions and that we understand things when they are presented to us through syntax. Sokolowski highlights the role of the spoken word in human reason and examines the bodily and neurological basis for human experience. Drawing on Husserl and Aristotle, as well as Aquinas and Henry James, Sokolowski here employs (...) phenomenology in a highly original way in order to clarify what we are as human agents. (shrink)

George Berkeley notoriously claimed that his immaterialist metaphysics was not only consistent with common sense but that it was also integral to its defense. Roberts argues that understanding the basic connection between Berkeley's philosophy and common sense requires that we develop a better understanding of the four principle components of Berkeley's positive metaphysics: The nature of being, the divine language thesis, the active/passive distinction, and the nature of spirits. Roberts begins by focusing on Berkeley's view of the nature of being. (...) He elucidates Berkeley's view on Locke and the Cartesians and by examining Berkeley's views about related concepts such as unity and simplicity. From there he moves on to Berkeley's philosophy of language arguing that scrutiny of the famous "Introduction" to the Principles of Human Knowledge reveals that Berkeley identified the ideational theory of meaning and understanding as the root cause of some of the worst of man's intellectual errors, not "abstract ideas." Abstract ideas are, rather, the most debilitating symptom of this underlying ailment. In place of the ideational theory, Berkeley defends a rudimentary "use theory" of meaning. This understanding of Berkeley's approach to semantics is then applied to the divine language thesis and is shown to have important consequences for Berkeley's pragmatic approach to the ontology of natural objects and for his approach to our knowledge of, and relation to other minds, including God's. Turning next to Berkeley's much aligned account of spirits, the author defends the coherence of Berkeley's view of spirits by way of providing an interpretation of the active/passive distinction as marking a normative distinction and by focusing on the role that divine language plays in letting Berkeley identify the soul with the will. With these four principles of Berkeley's philosophy in hand, he then returns to the topic of common sense and offers a defense of Berkeley's philosophy as built upon and expressive of the deepest metaphysical commitments of mainstream Christianity. Roberts' reappraisal of this important figure should appeal to all historians of philosophy as well as scholars in metaphysics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

An examination and defence of the concept of personality, long central to Western moral culture but now increasingly under attack. Robert Spaemann tackles urgent practical questions, such as our treatment of the severely disabled human and the moral status of intelligent non-human animals.

One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the science and philosophy of decision-making to mount a devastating case against free will, an argument with profound consequences Robert Sapolsky's Behave, his now classic account of why humans do good and why they do bad, pointed toward an unsettling conclusion: We may not grasp the precise marriage of nature and nurture that creates the physics and chemistry at the base of human behavior, but (...) that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Now, in Determined, Sapolsky takes his argument all the way, mounting a brilliant (and in his inimitable way, delightful) full-frontal assault on the pleasant fantasy that there is some separate self telling our biology what to do. Determined offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works-the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. One by one, Sapolsky tackles all the major arguments for free will and takes them out, cutting a path through the thickets of chaos and complexity science and quantum physics, as well as touching ground on some of the wilder shores of philosophy. He shows us that the history of medicine is in no small part the history of learning that fewer and fewer things are somebody's "fault"; for example, for centuries we thought seizures were a sign of demonic possession. Yet, as he acknowledges, it's very hard, and at times impossible, to uncouple from our zeal to judge others and to judge ourselves. Sapolsky applies the new understanding of life beyond free will to some of our most essential questions around punishment, morality, and living well together. By the end, Sapolsky argues that while living our daily lives recognizing that we have no free will is going to be monumentally difficult, doing so is not going to result in anarchy, pointlessness, and existential malaise. Instead, it will make for a much more humane world. (shrink)

Edward O. Wilson's sociobiology, as advocated in On Human Nature, is often criticized for its sensationalism and its anthropomorphisms. Critics have not recognized, however, that the so?called anthropomorphisms are essential to sociobiology, in so far as it seeks to address the humanities, and that the sensationalism derives from them. They are not just the sloppiness usually found in popularizations. Section I reviews the grounds for these criticisms and then ends by demonstrating that it is no less a confusion to label (...) these misuses of language ?anthropomorphisms?. Section II analyzes the style of reasoning, characteristic of scientism in general and sociobiology in particular, that sanctions misuses of language such as Wilson's. The flaw in this reasoning is that it depends upon the very language it sets out to debunk, in a way that renders its own arguments unintelligible. (shrink)

Philosophy has as much to do with feelings as it does with thoughts and thinking. Philosophy, accordingly, requires not only emotional sensitivity but an understanding of the emotions, not as curious but marginal psychological phenomena but as the very substance of life. In this, the second book in a series devoted to his work on the emotions, Robert Solomon presents a defense of the emotions and of sentimentality against the background of what he perceives as a long history of (...) abuse in philosophy and social thought and art and literary criticism. The title piece reopens a classic debate about the role of sentimentality in art and literature. In subsequent chapters, Solomon discusses not only such "moral sentiments" as sympathy and compassion but also grief, gratitude, love, horror, and even vengeance. He also defends, with appropriate caution, the "seven deadly sins." The emotions, at least some emotions--are essential to a well-lived life. They are or can be virtues, features of the human condition without which civilized life would be unimaginable. (shrink)

This is the most important book on Hegel to have appeared in the past ten years. Robert Pippin offers a completely new interpretation of Hegel's idealism, which focuses on Hegel's appropriation and development of kant's theoretical project. Hegel is presented neither as a precritical metaphysician nor as a social theorist, but as a critical philosopher whose disagreements with Kant, especially on the issue of intuitions, enrich the idealist arguments against empiricism, realism and naturalism. In the face of the dismissal (...) of absolute idealism as either unintelligible or implausible, Pippin explains and defends an original account of the philosophical basis for Hegel's claims about the historical and social nature of selfconsciousness, and so of knowledge itself. (shrink)

This study examines the issues associated with the disinvestment of U.S. interests from South Africa that took place in the mid-80s from the perspective of three dominant moral theories: utility, rights, and justice. By examining the issues in light of these three theories, the paper attempts to establish a decision framework from which managers and investors can evaluate similar decisions they are facing around the world today. Similarly, the reading may prove useful to educators who incorporate discussions of ethical decision (...) making into the classroom.Training in business ethics too often takes a strictly utilitarian perspective, or worse, a relativistic one. This study attempts to illustrate how utilitarian theory and related rights and justice issues can he interwoven into the heuristics associated with the contemporary concepts of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

The volume concludes by examining a critique of Hegel's metaphysical position from the perspective of the "continental" tradition, and in particular Gilles ...

Permissivism says that for some propositions and bodies of evidence, there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic attitude that can be taken towards that proposition given the evidence. Some critics of this view argue that it condones, as rationally acceptable, sets of attitudes that manifest an untenable kind of arbitrariness. I begin by providing a new and more detailed explication of what this alleged arbitrariness consists in. I then explain why Miriam Schoenfield’s prima facie promising attempt to answer the (...) Arbitrariness Objection, by appealing to the role of epistemic standards in rational belief formation, fails to resolve the problem. Schoenfield’s strategy is, however, a useful one, and I go on to explain how an alternative form of the standards-based approach to Permissivism – one that emphasizes the significance of the relationship between people’s cognitive abilities and the epistemic standards that they employ – can respond to the arbitrariness objection. (shrink)

Cet essai a pour motif central le mythe de l'Annonciation, fondateur de l'Europe contractualiste moderne. Il étudie l'importance de l'invasion des " barbares", de la rencontre avec l'Autre et du contrat que l'on passe avec lui, entente étrange d'où naît le sujet politique libre. Il a l'originalité de parler de l'Europe - le dernier continent inexploré -à partir d'un point de vue américain et de parler du politique à partir de textes littéraires: les écrits de Dante, Sade et Aquin. C'est (...) dans une petite barque, une embarcation toute frêle, que nous nous sommes lancé à la découverte d'un continent à peu près inconnu, plus farouche que le continent noir, plus sauvage que les Amériques, et composé de substances plus volatiles, plus inflammables que l'Asie ou l'Orient... Car le continent sur lequel nous avons mis le cap, c'est celui du Verbe. (shrink)

Comprehensie collection of historical and contemporary philosophies of technology, including Plato, Aristotle, St. Simon, Comte, Marx, Heidegger, Mumford, Foucault.

Robert Stalnaker draws together in this volume his seminal work in metaphysics. The central theme is the role of possible worlds in articulating our various metaphysical commitments. The book begins with reflections on the general idea of a possible world, and then uses the framework of possible worlds to formulate and clarify some questions about properties and individuals, reference, thought, and experience. The essays also reflect on the nature of metaphysics, and on the relation between questions about what there (...) is and questions about how we talk and think about what there is. Two of the fourteen essays, plus an extensive introduction that sets the papers in context and draws out the essays' common threads, are published here for the first time. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Spirit was Hegel's grandest experiement, changing our vision of the world and the very nature of philosophical enterprise. In this book, Solomon captures the bold and exhilarating spirit, presenting the Phenomenology as a thoroughly personal as well as philosophical work. He begins with a historical introduction, which lays the groundwork for a section-by-section analysis of the Phenomenology. Both the initiated as well as readers unacquainted with the intricacies of German idealism will find this to be an accessible (...) and exciting introduction to this great philosopher's monumental work. (shrink)

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of (...) Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

Machine‐learning algorithms have the potential to revolutionise diagnostic and prognostic tasks in health care, yet algorithmic performance levels can be materially worse for subgroups that have been underrepresented in algorithmic training data. Given this epistemic deficit, the inclusion of underrepresented groups in algorithmic processes can result in harm. Yet delaying the deployment of algorithmic systems until more equitable results can be achieved would avoidably and foreseeably lead to a significant number of unnecessary deaths in well‐represented populations. Faced with this dilemma (...) between equity and utility, we draw on two case studies involving breast cancer and melanoma to argue for the selective deployment of diagnostic and prognostic tools for some well‐represented groups, even if this results in the temporary exclusion of underrepresented patients from algorithmic approaches. We argue that this approach is justifiable when the inclusion of underrepresented patients would cause them to be harmed. While the context of historic injustice poses a considerable challenge for the ethical acceptability of selective algorithmic deployment strategies, we argue that, at least for the case studies addressed in this article, the issue of historic injustice is better addressed through nonalgorithmic measures, including being transparent with patients about the nature of the current epistemic deficits, providing additional services to algorithmically excluded populations, and through urgent commitments to gather additional algorithmic training data from excluded populations, paving the way for universal algorithmic deployment that is accurate for all patient groups. These commitments should be supported by regulation and, where necessary, government funding to ensure that any delays for excluded groups are kept to the minimum. We offer an ethical algorithm for algorithms—showing when to ethically delay, expedite, or selectively deploy algorithmic systems in healthcare settings. (shrink)

Clinical ethics is a relatively new discipline within medicine, generated not so much by the Can we . . . ? questions of fact and prognosis that physicians ...

Develops a theory of culture based on a metaphysics that elaborates on the Platonic and Confucian traditions. In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead’s project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville’s focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. (...) Part one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines. “Neville’s work is informed by a lifelong engagement with the most important philosophers in history, including Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, and Dewey. Here, he offers an important argument that there is beauty not only in how people see the world, but also in the world itself.” — Kevin Schilbrack, Appalachian State University. (shrink)

In “Conditions and Analyses of Knowledge”, Robert Shope focuses on the conditions that must be satisfied for a person to have knowledge, specifically knowledge that something is so. Traditionally, knowledge has been analyzed in terms of justified true belief. Shope addresses philosophers’ disagreements concerning the truth and belief conditions. After introducing the justification condition, he presents challenges that have provoked several attempts to replace or to supplement the justification condition for knowledge. Shope presents and assesses several of these, including (...) early causal theories, the nonaccidentality requirement, reliable process and conditional analyses, the reliable‐indicator analysis, the conclusive reasons analysis, defeasibility analyses, analyses in terms of cognitive or intellectual virtues, and proper functionalism as well as his own account of knowledge. (shrink)

This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems: (1) What are the defining and organizing forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretive methodologies, and other legal phenomena? (2) How does frontal and systematic focus on these forms advance understanding of such phenomena? (3) What credit should the functions of forms have when such phenomena serve policy and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political values such as democracy, liberty, and justice? This is the first book (...) that seeks to offer general answers to these questions and thus gives form in the law its due. The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, the oldest and foremost problem in legal theory and allied subjects. (shrink)

This paper explains how the practice of ‘no platforming’ can be reconciled with a liberal politics. While opponents say that no platforming flouts ideals of open public discourse, and defenders see it as a justifiable harm-prevention measure, both sides mistakenly treat the debate like a run-of-the-mill free speech conflict, rather than an issue of academic freedom specifically. Content-based restrictions on speech in universities are ubiquitous. And this is no affront to a liberal conception of academic freedom, whose purpose isn’t just (...) to protect the speech of academics, but also to give them the prerogative to determine which views and speakers have sufficient disciplinary credentials to receive a hearing in academic contexts. No platforming should therefore be acceptable to liberals, in principle, in cases where it is used to support a university culture that maintains rigorous disciplinary standards, by denying attention and credibility to speakers without appropriate disciplinary credentials. (shrink)

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing over two thousand years before Wall Street, called people who engaged in activities which did not contribute to society "parasites." In his latest work, renowned scholar Robert C. Solomon asserts that though capitalism may require capital, but it does not require, much less should it be defined by the parasites it inevitably attracts. Capitalism has succeeded not with brute strength or because it has made people rich, but because it has produced responsible citizens and--however (...) unevenly--prosperous communities. It cannot tolerate a conception of business that focuses solely on income and vulgarity while ignoring traditional virtues of responsibility, community, and integrity. Many feel that there is too much lip-service and not enough understanding of the importance of cooperation and integrity in corporate life. This book rejects the myths and metaphors of war-like competition that cloud business thinking and develops an "Aristotelean" theory of business. The author's approach emphasizes several core concepts: the corporation as community, the search for excellence, the importance of integrity and sound judgment, as well as a more cooperative and humane vision of business. Solomon stresses the virtues of honesty, trust, fairness, and compassion in the competitive business world, and confronts the problem of "moral mazes" and what he posits as its solution--moral courage. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an analysis of the structure and content of loneliness. We argue that this is an emotion of absence-an affective state in which certain social goods are regarded as out of reach for the subject of experience. By surveying the range of social goods that appear to be missing from the lonely person's perspective, we see what it is that can make this emotional condition so subjectively awful for those who undergo it, including the profound sense (...) of being unable to realise oneself, in collaboration with others. (shrink)