From the beginning to the end of his philosophizing, Sartre appears to have been concerned with "bad faith"—our "natural" disposition to flee from our freedom and to lie to ourselves. Virtually no aspect of his monumental system has generated more attention. Yet bad faith has been plagued by misinterpretation and misunderstanding. At the same time, Sartre's correlative concepts of "good faith" and "authenticity" have suffered neglect or insufficient attention, or been confused and wrongly identified by Sartre scholars, even by Sartre (...) himself. Ronald E. Santoni takes on the challenge of distinguishing these concepts, and of showing whether either or both existential "attitudes" afford deliverance from the hell of Sartre's bad faith. He offers the first fill-scale analysis, reconstruction, and differentiation of these ways of existing as they develop in Sartre's early works. Although he attempts to redeem Sartre's slighted concept of good faith, Santoni warns that it must not be viewed interchangeably with authenticity. Further, in one of the earliest and most sustained studies of Sartre's _Notebooks for an Ethics_ available in English, Santoni shows how Sartre's posthumously published notes for an "ethics of Salvation" confirm his differentiation and argument. The way out of Sartrean hell, Santoni insists, is authenticity—living "with fidelity" to our unjustifiable freedom and assuming responsibility for it. (shrink)

In this paper, I pay tribute to Jonathan Webber, one of the most dependable interpreters among recent Sartre scholars. I do so by challenging both him and Sartre on an issue that has long frustrated my work on Sartre. In short, Sartre contends that the For-itself’s desire to be Being-in-itself-for-itself is in bad faith. This raises two issues: Is this desire to be ens causa sui part of the ontological structure of the For-itself? If so, is bad faith an essential (...) part of the human being? I contend that the desire to be the In-itself-for-itself is, on Sartre’s premises, part of the ontological structure of an existing human being. As our original flight from freedom and “fundamental project,” this constitutes bad faith’s “coming into the world,” and remains part of Being-for-itself’s “natural” disposition to bad faith. (shrink)

From "Materialism and Revolution" through _Hope Now_, Jean-Paul Sartre was deeply engaged with questions about the meaning and justifiability of violence. In the first comprehensive treatment of Sartre’s views on the subject, Ronald Santoni begins by tracing the full trajectory of Sartre’s evolving thought on violence and shows how the "curious ambiguity" of freedom affirming itself against freedom in his earliest writings about violence developed into his "curiously ambivalent" position through his later writings.

The purpose of this article is to describe the operation of a four-year prevention and awareness campaign organized by an evangelical social action network that mobilized Brazilian local churches to confront the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents before and during the FIFA 2014 World Cup. The aspects explored in this article are: the birth of the campaign; the manner in which an evangelical network served as a catalyst to mobilize the church to confront sexual violence; and the lessons learned (...) from this experience. It was found that the problem of sexual exploitation of children and adolescents can be addressed through an enlightened and engaged church that accepts the biblical mandate to act with justice and mercy to the “least of the least” in our society: children. The church is a sleeping giant that must be awakened to break the silence of sexual violence and be a strong advocate for vulnerable children. (shrink)

This text provides a comprehensive and timely examination of the most pertinent factors affecting institutional ethics committees, for ethicists, trustees, administrators, physicians, clergy, nurses, social workers, attorneys and others with an interest in ethics committees.

Humanism and the Death of God is a critical exploration of secular humanism and its discontents. Through close readings of three exemplary nineteenth-century philosophical naturalists or materialists, who perhaps more than anyone set the stage for our contemporary quandaries when it comes to questions of human nature and moral obligation, Ronald E. Osborn argues that "the death of God" ultimately tends toward the death of liberal understandings of the human as well. Any fully persuasive defense of humanistic values--including the (...) core humanistic concepts of inviolable dignity, rights, and equality attaching to each individual--requires an essentially religious vision of personhood. Osborn shows such a vision is found in an especially dramatic and historically consequential way in the scandalous particularity of the Christian narrative of God becoming a human. He does not attempt to provide logical proofs for the central claims of Christian humanism along the lines some philosophers might demand. Instead, this study demonstrates how philosophical naturalism or materialism, and secular humanisms and anti-humanisms, might be persuasively read from the perspective of a classically orthodox Christian faith. (shrink)

From "Materialism and Revolution" through _Hope Now_, Jean-Paul Sartre was deeply engaged with questions about the meaning and justifiability of violence. In the first comprehensive treatment of Sartre’s views on the subject, Ronald Santoni begins by tracing the full trajectory of Sartre’s evolving thought on violence and shows how the "curious ambiguity" of freedom affirming itself against freedom in his earliest writings about violence developed into his "curiously ambivalent" position through his later writings.

Bad Faith and Sincerity: Does Sartre's Analysis Rest on a Mistake? In this opening chapter, I intend to deal with an issue that vexed my earliest ...

I have two aims: to analyze Jonathan Webber’s analysis of bad faith and compare it to my own, traditional, account and to show that Webber’s focus on character, as a set of dispositions or character traits that incline but do not determine us to view the world and behave in certain ways, contributes further to understanding Sartre’s ‘bad faith’. Most Sartre scholars have ignored any emphasis on ‘character’. What is distinctive and emphatic in Webber’s interpretation is his insistence ‘on bad (...) faith’ as a ‘social disease’ distorting the way one views, interprets, and even thinks about the world.. But, again, this pattern is not deterministic. Early in his work, Webber tells us that Sartre does not claim that we have bad faith by ‘ascribing character traits where there are none but by pretending to ourselves that we have ‘fixed natures’ that e.g. preclude the behaviour or character trait of which one is being accused.Though hardly disagreeing radically with Webber I do offer critical considerations. While Webber focuses on character, I focus on Sartre’s contention that the ‘most basic’ or ‘first act’ of bad faith is ‘to flee from what [the human being] cannot flee, from what it is’, specifically human freedom. And I disagree partially with Webber’s articulation of the ‘spirit of seriousness’, and strongly with both Sartre’s and his supporting claim that bad faith cannot be cynical. I also demur from Webber’s overemphasis on the ‘social’. For me, the root of all bad faith is our primitive ontological condition; namely, that at its very ‘upsurge’, human reality, anguished by its ‘reflective apprehension’ of its freedom and lack of Being, is disposed to flee from its nothingness in pursuit of identity, substantiality - in short, Being. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to follow a lead of Prof. Stanley Cavell's in his paper, "Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation." The lead is: "to understand an utterance religiously you have to be able to share its perspective... The religious is a Kierkegaardian stage of life; and I suggest it should be thought of as a Wittgensteinian form of life." I try to present "form of life" as a larger picture sometimes necessary for understanding language-games, and to suggest that (...) what counts as a form of life will depend upon what particular language-game one is trying to understand. Sometimes then, a person's religious belief might figure into this process as a relevant form of life. I then try to represent Kierkegaard's religious stage by discussing three related concepts: paradox, ideal interpretation, and subjectivity. Paradox is one criterion for marking off the religious stage from the ethical and the aesthetical stages. In the religious stage, the talk of believers about God is such that it interprets the events in one's life according to that belief. In calling this an "ideal interpretation" Kierkegaard is calling our attention to the difference between this and the scientific talk of hypothesis, observation, and evidence. The religious stage is subjectivity—a way of life. In it, the truth of what one says is measured by how one lives in relation to it. This, I suggest, is quite close to Wittgenstein's idea of a form of life being important for understanding the language used within it. My conclusion is that Prof. Cavell's suggestion is a helpful lead in thinking about the connection between Wittgenstein's "form of life" and Kierkegaard's religious stage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Russell's external world: 1912-1921 by Ronald E. Nusenoff IN "The Relation of Sense-data to Physics",lOur Knowledge ofthe External World,2 and "The Ultimate Constituents ofMatter",3 Russell presents a phenomenalistic reduction ofphysical objects. On this theory, the external world becomes a physical space of six dimensions, which must be logically constructed by a three-dimensional ordering of three-dimensional phenomenal spaces. In what follows, we will consider Russell's varying views, from causal (...) realism in The Problems of Philosophy,4 through phenomenalism, to neutral monism in The Analysis ofMind,5 on the nature ofthe external world. We will pay particular attention to the relation between physical and phenomenal space, and the status ofthe causal theory ofperception. 1. Realism (1912) In The Problems ofPhilosophy, Russell distinguishes a single "real" space ofscience from the "apparent" spaces ofperception. He begins with various cases of perceptual relativity, illusion, etc., and from these infers that those object which are immediately known to us are not the physical objects which the layman might take them to be. Rather, what are immediately known are sense-data, these being caused by, and so in some sense "corresponding" to, physical obI "The Relation of Sense-data to Physics", Scientia, 4 (1914), reprinted as Chapter VIII of Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London, 1918). 2 Our Knowledge ofthe External World as a Fieldfor Scientific Method in Philosophy (London, 1914). 3 "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter", Monist, 25 (1915), reprinted as Chapter VII of Mysticism and Logic. 4 The Problems ofPhilosophy (London, 1946 [lst published, 1912]). 5 The Analysis of Mind (London, 1921). 65 66 Russell, nos. 29-32 (1978) jects. Physical objects are located in "one public all-embracing physical space", while "our sense-data are situated in our private spaces, either the space of sight or the space of touch or such vaguer spaces as other senses may give us".6 Through experience, we are able to correlate these various private sense-data spaces (i.e., in so far as we can correlate experiences in one with experiences in another). What Russell does not go on to do here is define physical space in terms of private spaces. Given that (a) Space is relational rather than absolute, and (b) All that we can know about physical objects is that both they and their relations "correspond" to our sense-data and their relations, then (c) "we may assume that there is a physical space in which physical objects have spatial relations corresponding to those which the corresponding sense-data have in our private spaces".7 Our knowledge of physical space is then merely knowledge of relative position, and other features, e.g., shape, are "only supposed to correspond to the physical space so far as is required for the preservation of the order".8 On this view, the existence ofa physical space is necessitated solely by, and so is no more plausible than, the need for physcial objects. Russell's argument for accepting our "instinctive" belief that physical objects exist is less than compelling. Since this belief does not lead to any difficulties, but on the contrary tends to simplify and systemize our account of our experiences, there seems no good reason for rejecting it.9 In what follows, ~e shall see that Russell's phenomenalism is not explainable as differing from the realism found in The Problems of Philosophy merely in the rejection of this "instinctive" belief. II. Phenomenalism (1914-?) In his "Reply to Criticisms" in the Schilpp collection,IO Russell seems to deny that he ever really accepted phenomenalism. 6 The Problems of Philosophy, pp. 30-1 7 Ibid., p. 31. 8 Ibid., p. 33. 9Ibid., p. 24. 10"Reply to Criticisms", in P.A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy ofBertrand Russell (Evanston and Chicago, 1944), pp. 679-741. Russell's external world 67 Mr. Boodin quotes a passage from me according to which it appears that at a certain time I thought only percepts were real. This was a technical hypothesis which I was trying to make logically adequate. II However, only a few pages earlier he had remarked: There are some who would deny that physics need say anything about what cannot... (shrink)

Although interactions of proteins with glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), such as heparin and heparan sulphate, are of great biological importance, structural requirements for protein‐GAG binding have not been well‐characterised. Ionic interactions are important in promoting protein‐GAG binding. Polyelectrolyte theory suggests that much of the free energy of binding comes from entropically favourable release of cations from GAG chains. Despite their identical charges, arginine residues bind more tightly to GAGs than lysine residues. The spacing of these residues may determine protein‐GAG affinity and specificity. (...) Consensus sequences such as XBBBXXBX, XBBXBX and a critical 20 Å spacing of basic residues are found in some protein sites that bind GAG. A new consensus sequence TXXBXXTBXXXTBB is described, where turns bring basic interacting amino acid residues into proximity. Clearly, protein‐GAG interactions play a prominent role in cell‐cell interaction and cell growth. Pathogens including virus particles might target GAG‐binding sites in envelope proteins leading to infection. BioEssays 20:156–167, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Flavonoids are a class of low molecular weight phenolic compounds that is widely distributed in the plant kingdom. They exhibit a diverse spectrum of biological functions and play an important role in the interaction between plants and their environment. Flavonoids not only protect the plant from the harmful effects of UV irradiation but also play a crucial role in the sexual reproduction process. A special class of flavonoid polymers, the tannins, plays a structural role in the plant. Yet other classes (...) of flavonoids, flavonols and anthocyanins, have been implicated in the attraction of pollinators. Certain flavonoids participate in the interaction between plants and other organisms such as symbiotic bacteria and parasites. This raises the intriguing question as to how these different compounds arose and evolved. Based on taxonomy and molecular analysis of gene expression patterns it is possible to deduce a putative sequence of acquisition of the different branches of the biosynthetic pathway and their regulators. (shrink)