Although no one unified anarchist theory exists, educational approaches can be taken to support the full liberation of the self and the construction of an interconnected community that strives to rid itself of eco-sociocultural oppressions. An anarchist pedagogical approach could be one that is rooted in a love/rage unit of analysis occurring along a spectrum of various types of actions and contributions within a community. Anarchism as a violent destruction of the state is a stereotypical view that has perhaps (...) led to its own early demise as a social movement. Anarchism that embraces adaptation through more inclusive forms of resistance, including a reconstruction for the K?12 classroom context, is one that stands a chance in evolving a society toward love, justice, and empowerment. This article explores those possibilities aiming for accessibility while still honoring core anarchist calls for strong, localized democratic participation and decision-making outside of permanent hierarchies. (shrink)

What accounts for our pleasure in tragic art? In a widely-cited essay, Susan Feagin argues that this pleasure has moral roots; it arises when we discover ourselves to be the sort of people who respond sympathetically to another’s suffering. Although critical of Feagin’s particular solution to the tragedy paradox, I too believe that our pleasure in tragedy often has moral roots. I trace those roots differently, however, by placing the concept of virtue front and center. I argue that a noble (...) pleasure arises when we perceive virtue in tragic characters and when we practice it ourselves as audience members. My account draws on insights from the history of philosophy, most notably Aquinas’s conception of the virtues of charity and mercy in the Summa. (shrink)

This essay begins with the assumption that many of our moral disputes have deeper roots in disagreement over worldview propositions. If this is true, and if there is a fact of the matter about worldview propositions, such that one could know the truth of at least some of them, then this makes it possible for one to maintain one’s moral beliefs, even despite the persistent, pervasive disagreements so common today. I argue that this holds true even when those debates include (...) supposed peers and when the worldview propositions themselves are highly disputed. (shrink)

Research involving recently deceased humans that are physiologically maintained following declaration of death by neurologic criteria—or ‘research involving the recently deceased’—can fill a translational research gap while reducing harm to animals and living human subjects. It also creates new challenges for honouring the donor’s legacy, respecting the rights of donor loved ones, resource allocation and public health. As this research model gains traction, new empirical ethics questions must be answered to preserve public trust in all forms of tissue donation and (...) in the practice of medicine while respecting the legacy of the deceased and the rights of donor loved ones. This article suggests several topics for immediate investigation to understand the attitudes and experiences of researchers, clinical collaborators, donor loved ones and the public to ensure research involving the recently deceased advances ethically. (shrink)

Addresses the connections between self-love and self-governance in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and defends three related theses. Accordingly, the book provides a systematic account of Aquinas's thoughts on the nature of a person's self-experience and the role that experience plays in self-governance.

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This study examines a model involving income, the love of money, pay satisfaction, organizational commitment, job changes, and unethical behavior among 211 full-time employees in Hong Kong, China. Direct paths suggested that the love of money was related to unethical behavior, but income (money) was not. Indirect paths showed that income was negatively related to the love of money that, in turn, was negatively related to pay satisfaction that, in turn, was negatively associated with unethical behavior. Pay (...) satisfaction was positively related to organizational commitment. Thus, the love of money is the root of evil, but money is not. (shrink)

In his late reflections on values and forms of life from the 1920s and 1930s, Husserl develops the concept of personal value and argues that these values open two kinds of infinities in our lives. On the one hand personal values disclose infinite emotive depths in human individuals while on the other hand they connect human individuals in continuous and progressive chains of care. In order to get at the core of the concept, I will explicate Husserl’s discussion of personal (...) values of love by distinguishing between five related features. I demonstrate that values of love (1) are rooted in egoic depts and define who we are as persons, (2) differ from objective values in being absolute and non-comparative, (3) ground vocational lives as organizing principles, (4) are endlessly self-disclosing and self-intensifying, and (5) establish transitive relations of care between human beings. On the basis of my five-partite distinction, I argue that Husserl’s concepts of love and value of love reveal the dynamic character of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Contextualist scholars working on the rhetoric of corporeal presence in seventeenth-century English religious lyrics have naturally focused their attention on sacramental discourse of the Reformation era. As part of the Common Knowledge symposium on the future of contextualism, this full-length monograph, serialized in installments, argues that the contextualist focus on a single and time-limited “epistemic field” has resulted in a less than adequately ramified understanding of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. What the contextualist (...) approach misses is that even the religious discourses of the period were tied to a long and in no way local epistemological debate about signs and their meaning, whose roots are to be found in Greek and Latin rhetorical theory. This first installment of “Tokens of Love” commences a discussion of the role of classical pagan sign-theory in the development of Reformation sacramental discourse. (shrink)

Analyzing writings ranging from the Puritans to the present day, Loving God's Wildness traces the effects of Christian theology on America's ecological imagination, revealing the often conflicted ways in which Americans relate to and perceive the natural world.

We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much [ … ] Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aeri...

This book discusses the complexities of love and the nature of erotic passion as these appear in the great love stories of the world. Starting with the story of Romeo and Juliet and its roots in European Christianity, the authors uncover hidden depths of cultural and universal significance in famous romantic tales of the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent-'Layla and Majnun', 'Heer and Ranjha', 'Sohni and Mahinwal', 'Vis and Ramin', and 'Radha and Krishna'. Moving westward again, Kakar (...) and Ross look at the Greek myth of Oedipus, the Celtic saga of Tristan and Isolde, the tragic drama of Hamlet, the legend of Phaedra and Hippolytus, and a contemporary handling of the love theme in the writings of Vladimir Nabokov. This new edition, published after 25 years of the first edition, includes an Epilogue which re-evaluates the authors' assertions about romantic and erotic love in the context of contemporary psychoanalysis and modern literary theory. (shrink)

C. Stephen Evans explains and defends Kierkegaard's account of moral obligations as rooted in God's commands, the fundamental command being `You shall love your neighbour as yourself'. The work will be of interest not only to those interested in Kierkegaard, but also to those interested in the relation between ethics and religion, especially questions about whether morality can or must have a religious foundation. As well as providing a comprehensive reading of Kierkegaard as an ethical thinker, Evans puts him (...) into conversation with contemporary moral theorists. Kierkegaard's divine command theory is shown to be an account that safeguards human flourishing, as well as protecting the proper relations between religion and state in a pluralistic society. (shrink)

Von Wright argued that moral goodness is a derivative form of goodness. He proceeded to give an account of the moral goodness of an act, in terms of the good of man. Philosophical anthropology must render the phenomenon of morality intelligible. This chapter suggests that the roots of moral value lie in human sympathy, in maternal love, in intuitive recognition of the humanity of others, and in the nature of loving friendship. The sentiment of sympathy is virtually ubiquitous, but (...) sympathetic propensities vary from person to person, being partly a function of their imagination. Sympathy is an emotional tap‐root of moral reasons and a presupposition of moral reasoning. Kant's argument in support of a requirement of equal formal respect for human beings as moral agents is problematic. The explicit emergence of the idea of formal respect is one of the great advances in our evolving understanding of human nature and our conception of ourselves. (shrink)

Sport provides an arena for human flourishing. For some, this pursuit of a meaningful life through sport involves the use of non-human animals, not least of all through sport hunting. This paper will take seriously that sport – including sport hunting – can provide a meaningful arena for human flourishing. Additionally, it will accept for present purposes that animals are of less moral value than humans. This paper will show that, even accepting these premises, much use of animals for sport (...) – including sport hunting – is unacceptable. Nonetheless it will show that there can be acceptable ways of using animals as part of a human’s meaningful life pursuits through sport, albeit in a more limited fashion than many sportspersons currently accept. (shrink)

RESUMEN A partir de los manuscritos tardíos de Husserl sobre ética, donde la dimensión afectiva de la experiencia del deber es reconocida con un estatus ético pleno, se busca analizar la concepción husserliana del amor como fuente de normatividad ética. Se aborda el amor ético y su distinción frente a las formas naturales e instintivas en las que arraiga, y se examina el tratamiento del mandato ético de amor al prójimo, con énfasis en lo relativo a su extensión universal. ABSTRACT (...) The article seeks to analyze the Husserlian conception of love as a source of ethical normativity. To that effect, it discusses Husserl's late writings on ethics, in which the affective dimension of the experience of duty is awarded full ethical status. The paper addresses ethical love and its differences with the natural and instinctive forms in which it is rooted, and examines how Husserl deals with the ethical mandate to love one's neighbor, emphasizing its universal scope. (shrink)

There is a prima facie conflict between the values of love and autonomy. How can we bind ourselves to a person and still enjoy the fruits of self-determination? This chapter argues that the solution to this conflict lies in recognizing that love is the basis of autonomy: one must love a person in order to truly appreciate their autonomy. To make this case, this chapter defends a minimalist account of love, according to which love is (...) an agreeable sensation that is experienced when considering the existence of another person. On this view, the lover does not desire anything from the beloved but works to attend to their presence. Love, then, puts us in a position to appreciate the beloved in their particular way of being. By accepting the presence of the beloved we gain a sense of their autonomy. The roots of this account of love are found in the writings of Damaris Cudworth Masham. This chapter draws on the work of Kieran Setiya, David Velleman, and Kyla Ebels-Duggan to elaborate on and defend Masham’s views. (shrink)

The present article focuses on American and European personalism during the early part of the twentieth century . The immediate predecessor of the personalist movement as such was the philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze who inspired two of his students, Methodist Borden Parker Bowne and Rudolf Eucken. In France, in the meantime, Charles Renouvier published his Le personnalisme in 1903, while Emmanuel Mounier later presented personalism as a new political philosophy under the influence Alexandre Marc’s comments on Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethik. Mounier’s (...) Manifeste au service du personnalisme develops a dialectical critique on both liberal bourgeois individualism and all forms of collectivism, all, in his opinion, ‘inverted theocracies’ with shared dehumanizing tendencies. As alternative, it was necessary for personalism to become the leading spiritual and philosophical guide in order to Refaire la Renaissance . As a matter of fact, Jacques Maritain’s Humanisme intégral might justly be considered a first attempt to describe the nature of a new civilization in any detail. Maritain is more explicit on the Christian face of this new humanism, while refuting any kind of mancentred humanism. Mounier’s and Maritain’s personalist ideas together with Max Scheler’s non-formal ethics of value and his Aktlehre had a considerable influence on Louis Janssens. In Personne et société he not only criticizes several contemporary European ideologies in line with Mounier, but he also accepts that persons can only be really known by co-operation, in line with Scheler’s idea of inter-subjectivity and Aquinas’ idea of the social nature of the human being. Following Maritain, Janssens distinguishes between the human being as individual and the human person. Individuality contains a material component, characterized by its concrete position in space and time, while the person and his/her spiritual component facilitate a movement away from the self towards others in freedom and love. The person is not only understood as the highest value, he/she is able to control the hierarchy of values by his/her ordo amoris, a flexible undertaking influenced by the love of others in which love opens each person for growth towards higher values. (shrink)

Evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo) is a loose conglomeration of research programs in the life sciences with two main axes: (a) the evolution of development, or inquiry into the pattern and processes of how ontogeny varies and changes over time; and, (b) the developmental basis of evolution, or inquiry into the causal impact of ontogenetic processes on evolutionary trajectories—both in terms of constraint and facilitation. Philosophical issues are found along both axes surrounding concepts such as evolvability, novelty, and modularity. The developmental (...) basis of evolution has garnered much attention because it speaks to the possibility of revising a standard construal of evolutionary theory, but the evolution of development harbors its own conceptual questions. This article addresses the heterogeneity of Evo-devo’s conglomerate structure (including disagreements over its individuation), as well as the concepts and controversies of philosophical interest pertaining to the evolution of development and the developmental basis of evolution. Future research will benefit from a shift away from global theorizing toward the scientific practices of Evo-devo. (shrink)

Downton Abbey is, at its most basic, a story driven by intimate, romantic relationships: Mary and Matthew, Bates and Anna, Sybil and Branson, Lord and Lady Grantham, and many others. As viewers, we root for (or against) these characters as they fall in love, quarrel, break up, reconcile, have children, and deal with separation and death. But what do we get out of this? Is it merely an emotional “rush,” or is it something more meaningful? In this essay, (...) I’ll attempt to answer this question by examining how the relationships portrayed in Downton Abbey might look to the characters of Plato’s Symposium, one of the first (and most famous) philosophical treatments of love. The residents of Downtown Abbey provide ideal models for exploring and critiquing the various “theories of love” offered by the Symposium’s characters. Thomas’s defense of James, for example, provides a great illustration of Phaedrus’s claim about the relationship between love and courage, while Mary’s early struggles illuminate Pausanias’s suggestion that “pure” love can be achieved only by following (well-designed) social rules. By contrast, Bates and Anna help give content to Aristophanes’ s idea that love involves finding your “missing half,” while Carson’s and Mrs. Hughes’ relationship exemplify the sort of “order” celebrated by Eryximachus. Edith, for her part, seems to have fallen for Agathon’s sophistical claim that romantic love can only truly be experienced by the young and beautiful. Finally, Socrates’s famous account of the “ladder of love” can be seen most vividly in the transformative relationship of Sybil and Bronson. Along the way, we’ll consider what is really meant by “Platonic love,” and consider what the characters of Downton Abbey can teach about this invaluable philosophical concept. (shrink)

Part of the draw of athletics is its straightforwardness. There are nuances to competitions to make them more sporting contests, but at the end of a long jump competition whomever records the longest jump should win. Unfortunately, a recent rule-change at the highest level of the sport – the “Final 3” format – undermined this simplicity for the horizontal jumps and the throws for some of the 2020 and much of the 2021 seasons. While fortunately this rule was largely reverted (...) within days of the initial submission of this paper, it’s still valuable to critically evaluate why such a rule is problematic so as to better understand of the value of sporting competitions and give guidance on future rule changes, be they in athletics or other sports. To that end, we will be drawing from the literature on the purpose and value of competitions and coupling that with simulations based on data from actual top-tier long jump competitions to show that the Final 3 format makes for significantly worse competitions than the standard format. (shrink)

Philosophers working on animal ethics have focused, with good reason, on the wrongness of cruelty toward animals and of devaluing their lives. I argue that the theoretical resources of animal ethics are far from exhausted. Moreover, reflection on what makes animals ethically significant is relevant for thinking about the roots of morality and therefore about ethical relationships between human beings. I rely on a normative approach to animal ethics grounded in the importance of meeting needs in general and, in particular, (...) needs for affection and companionship. I draw on testimonies of shared love between people and animals, and on Raimond Gaita's work on the importance of emotional connections between creatures who are similarly needy. The ethics of care, which attaches special importance to meeting needs, provides an integrative theoretical framework. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 According to the Hegelian scheme re-proposed by Honneth, the first pattern of intersubjective recognition, still below the juridical mediation, is the sphere of interactions marked by affective bonds, or love. It is considered a first stage mostly because recognition is rooted in the partners' mutual dependency as needy creatures, which demand care and the emotional approval that follows it. In this sense, a constitutional lacking emerges as the fundamental character (...) of the most primitive kinds of interaction embedded in social norms. And that is important inasmuch the other stages of recognitive practices depend on this first one, in which subjects acquire capacities for rational and moral reasoning and action in the public sphere. However, one could question to what extent the same normative structure can be taking as underlying every loving relationship, as oriented by an affirmation of the subject's independence, while presupposing involuntary feelings of liking and attraction. After all, if the aspirations of reciprocal recognition in this realm are intrinsically related to very concrete features, why taking child caring, friendship and sexual encounter as referred to the same set of recognition patterns? If Honneth's recourse to psychoanalytic theory makes it clear why in all these kinds of interaction is to be found erotic contents of libidinal character, on the other hand one gets no clue on why the very different forms of satisfaction of the drives do not come into consideration. At this point it seems important to recall Georges Bataille's account of sexuality to think not only about the limits of recognition, but also its dialectical structure. The central notion of transgression helps understand why the normative grounds of intersubjective acknowledgment regarding at least some love relationships require a sort of suspension which is not the mere suppression of their validity: the violence that resides at the core of such erotic, transgressive experiences points to a disruptive effect over the features of subjective arrangement, intersubjectively formed. That is why excitement and fear, pleasure and anguish intertwine in eroticism, and desire becomes the name of a fascinating and frightening ontological excess. It is this very paradoxical character that is decisive for Bataille, for if norms need their transgression in order to exert a subjective inscription, one should not take the passage from desire to recognition as just a progressive process towards a determined form of sociality. Bataille associates a certain Durkheimian heritage with a philosophy of life to account for a libidinal economy of recognition in which desire lies at its very core. This paper proposes a reflection on what is at stake in this conceptual operation, and on the significance of the peculiar enjoyment of norms to a rethinking of the particular aspirations of recognition in love relationships. (shrink)

The vice of acedia deserves—and rewards—a closer reading than is implied in the old rendering ‘sloth’, or even in contemporary readings of ‘spiritual sloth’. Such is at least true in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, the subject of the following close reading of this enigmatic vice. Investigating the question on acedia and its grounding in portions of I-II, I first establish acedia’s basis not in a sovereign spiritual ‘choice’ but in the sensitive appetite and the passion of sorrow. This turns the portrait (...) of acedia’s ‘patients’ from those who avoid to those who embrace the labors of love, those who experience acedia’s sorrow in the very midst of pursuing divine joy. A third section steps back to show the entire problem of acedia, including its ‘slothful’ effects, in terms of this one fundamental sorrow that suppresses joy—real rest—in the Lord. I end with Thomas’s remedy, the hope-charged possibility of rising up in defense of the divine joy, turning back acedia’s sorrow at every point of its attack and reclaiming the pleasure of sharing in God’s life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 90-92 [Access article in PDF] Christian Views on Ritual Practice The Ongoing Creation of Loving Community: Christian Ritual and Ethics Jay T. RockNational Council of Churches of ChristAt the center of Christian practice is an ethical imperative: "This is my commandment," Jesus says; "Love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12). This principle of active love lies at the heart of (...) Christian living.The argument about who is to be included in the circle of those to be loved, much alive in Jesus' own day, continues unabated. Christians do not agree whether the "sisters and brothers" whom one is instructed to love in various passages of the Christian canon refers only to the family of those in the Church, or to the family of all humankind. But there is certainly agreement that simply professing love is not enough: the love God has given is fully embraced only in being done.Given such a central emphasis on reconciling, active love, it is not surprising to find Christian ritual almost always directly connected to, and fully completed in, ethical behavior in the world. Even in the important ways in which Christian rites serve to open the individual and community to receive God, to become aware of the presence of the Ultimate Reality in their lives, one finds implicit links to acting in love. Christian ritual is itself incarnational: it continuously creates and recreates a community into which it incorporates individuals, and it reactualizes moments of sacred history in a way that opens them to the active participation and concrete action of the people.Some comments on the nature and significance of commemoration in the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper, may illustrate what I mean. These are the central liturgical celebrations of Christianity, one recalling the baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan River, the other, more complex, connected to the events of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem. They are commemorations of past historical events, the memory of which is preserved in the theology and practice of the community. But their celebration by the community makes these events existentially present, and their meanings real and accessible, in several ways.Through Baptism, individuals enter into the Jesus community, and participate in the life of Christ. The rite is understood to effect a permanent bond between the one baptized, and Jesus, in whose name she is baptized. The one being baptized is taken down into water, and there is understood to die and rise with Christ: the ritual "makes present again what God has done through Jesus" and brings the Christian into direct, existential relation to the "actual happening of salvation in Christ." 1 Through this connection, the person undergoes a transition from the ways of "death" and "darkness" into the way of "light."The Eucharistic celebration, similarly, provides believers a way of entering into the events of Jesus' death and resurrection. In it, Christians both take part in these [End Page 90] acts of redemption--his death and rising again--and also take into themselves the body and blood of Jesus. The sacrament is a central way in which Christians partake of/take part in the Body of Christ. The rite commemorates a past event, but more importantly, it brings to present life the person of Christ, and allows active participation in the ongoing, communal expression of God's self-giving in Christ.In these rituals, a particular kind of historical memory is at work: that of anamnesis, which the Lutheran liturgist Frank Senn suggests might be best approximated in English as "reactualization." 2 This kind of remembering involves not simply a return to past events, but the placing of the past into the present situation. Ethicist John Pawlikowski reminds us that this concept has roots in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the biblical sense of zakar: just as it is only in being remembered by God that we continue in existence, remembering in this sense "brings the past as close as possible so that it becomes... (shrink)

Drawing on history, politics, psychology and pop culture, the author traces the roots of sexual liberation to explain love's supreme paradox, and concludes that love's messiness, surprises and paradoxes are not merely the sources of its pain--but also of its pleasure.

Bhakti has been an all-pervasive concept in the philosophical and religious traditions of India. The origin of bhakti can be traced in the Vedas wherein the root-word bhaj and various synonyms appear and in that point in time no distinction was made between secular and religious love. Narada Bhakti Sutra is a premier treatise on the nature of bhakti that emphasizes the connection between bhakti and prema and treats the age-old enigma about the nature of love in (...) an original fashion. NBS has usually been interpreted in a theistic manner, often with theistic interpolations into the text. This paper interprets NBS with a philosophical approach to discover its unique insights on the perennial philosophical issue, namely, 'what is love?' and shows that NBS harks back to the age of the Vedas in which secular love and religious love were inter-twined. (shrink)

In *Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case*, BAI Tongdong says that his main target is democracy, but he focuses much of his critiques on liberalism, rejecting its foundational value of autonomy in favor of Confucian grounds for governance. Given the extent of his concurrence with liberalism, however, it would be more consistent with Bai’s stated aim (of tempering the democratic part and shoring up the liberal side of liberal democracy) to make common cause with liberalism against populism. Mencian compassion and (...) humaneness have much to add to liberal conversation about virtue, and a Mencian-liberal theory of governance, instead, could yield the Confucian ideal of ‘harmony without uniformity,’. (shrink)

Suffering is a ubiquitous yet elusive concept in health care. In a field devoted to the pursuit of objective data, suffering is a phenomenon with deep ties to subjective experience, moral values, and cultural norms. Suffering’s tie to subjective experience makes it challenging to discern and respond to the suffering of others. In particular, the question of whether a child with profound neurocognitive disabilities can suffer has generated a robust discourse, rooted in philosophical conceptualizations of personhood as well as the (...) academic and experiential expertise of practiced health-care professionals. The issue remains unresolved because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to ever truly know an infant’s lived experience. But what if this is not the best question? What if instead of asking “can this infant suffer?” the discourse is broadened to ask “is there suffering here?” This latter question demands attention to patients’ subjective experiences of suffering, but also to the web of relationships that envelop them. Without losing sight of the importance of patients’ experiences, consideration of their relationships may elucidate the presence of suffering when the patients themselves are unable to provide the same clarity. In this essay, care ethics frames an examination of how suffering manifests in the loving and caring relationships that surround an infant with profound neurocognitive disabilities, changing those relationships and affecting the individuals within them. Exploring suffering through these relationships may offer clarity on the presence and content of suffering for infants with profound cognitive disabilities, in turn offering moral guidance for responding to suffering and supporting flourishing in this context. (shrink)

In this chapter, DeYoung explores the vice of sloth and how its traditional conception differs from popular thought. Pulling from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, Augustine, and Aquinas, DeYoung reconnects sloth to its spiritual roots to see how this vice detracts from love.

According to the view we may term “strong cognitivism”, all reasons for action are rooted in normative features that the motivated subject takes objects to have independently of her attitudes towards these objects. The main concern of this paper is to argue against strong cognitivism, that is, to establish the view that conative attitudes do provide subjects with reasons for action. The central argument to this effect is a top-down argument: it proceeds by an analysis of the complex phenomenon of (...) love and derives a conclusion regarding the nature of more basic mental phenomena—particular desires. More specifically, its starting point is the crude intuition that the significance conferred by love upon its objects is of a distinctively personal kind—an intuition that is expressed by the apparent non-substitutability of two similar subjects only one of whom is loved with respect to their importance for the lover. I argue that the initial notion of non-substitutability can be refined and modified so as to form a real challenge to all versions of strong cognitivism and to establish the existence of attitude-dependent reasons. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article takes up questions regarding the interrelation of the given and the undetermined in Augustine’s understanding of the self. As a critical point, it argues that debate regarding the Augustinian self has been marked by an emphasis on given structures that has constricted conceptions of human becoming. This emphasis emerges by way of competing narratives of discovery: Augustine is presented as a discoverer either of a constitutive space of the self, or of a determinative temporality. It results in (...) accounts of formation that occlude the spiritual significance of the full sweep of Christ’s history, from incarnation through ascension. As a constructive point, this article argues that Augustine positions himself to develop a Christological vision of Christian becoming, rooted in attention to all aspects of Christ’s life and work, by understanding space and time not as structures that fix the bounds of human becoming, but rather as realities that take on different forms in accordance with differing modes of love. (shrink)

In “Post‐Liberation Feminism,” Ladelle McWhorter raises the question of what practices will be helpful to further feminist goals if we are no longer in a state of domination, but are still oppressed. McWhorter finds resources in Michel Foucault's concept of “practices of freedom” to begin to answer this question. I build upon McWhorter's insight while recalling Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: namely, that sexual love, as conceived in hoodoo and the blues, became a terrain upon which newly (...) emancipated blacks worked out what their newfound freedom meant. In this essay, I consider what practices of freedom would look like within a life‐giving nexus of hoodoo, blues, and sexual love. Not only does the image of the hoodoo woman, prevalent within the blues, emerge through an interaction of race, class, region, gender, sexuality, and spiritualty, but analyzing sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling will help us track how sexual love was transformed into a practice of freedom. I will argue that sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling reveals an important dimension of emancipatory work that both defies categorization as resistance and is crucial to the development of capacities for resistance. (shrink)

Love in general and the order of the passions -- Rational love: in itself, natural dilection as root of choice, and love's twofold structure -- Twofold beatitude and the love thereof -- Dilection for others -- Charity and love of beatitude -- Charity in faith -- Charity in glory -- An Aporia? -- Towards a resolution.

In “Post-Liberation Feminism,” Ladelle McWhorter raises the question of what practices will be helpful to further feminist goals if we are no longer in a state of domination, but are still oppressed. McWhorter finds resources in Michel Foucault's concept of “practices of freedom” to begin to answer this question. I build upon McWhorter's insight while recalling Angela Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: namely, that sexual love, as conceived in hoodoo and the blues, became a terrain upon which newly (...) emancipated blacks worked out what their newfound freedom meant. In this essay, I consider what practices of freedom would look like within a life-giving nexus of hoodoo, blues, and sexual love. Not only does the image of the hoodoo woman, prevalent within the blues, emerge through an interaction of race, class, region, gender, sexuality, and spiritualty, but analyzing sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling will help us track how sexual love was transformed into a practice of freedom. I will argue that sexual love within this hoodoo–blues coupling reveals an important dimension of emancipatory work that both defies categorization as resistance and is crucial to the development of capacities for resistance. (shrink)

This book is a critical introduction to the philosophy of social science. While most social scientists maintain that the social sciences should stand free of politics, this book argues that they should be politically partisan. Root offers a clear description and provocative criticism of many of the methods and ideals that guide research and teaching in the social sciences.

It is a common complaint that antireductionist arguments are primarily negative. Here I describe an alternative nonreductionist epistemology based on considerations taken from multidisciplinary research in biology. The core of this framework consists in seeing investigation as coordinated around sets of problems (problem agendas) that have associated criteria of explanatory adequacy. These ideas are developed in a case study, the explanation of evolutionary innovations and novelties, which demonstrates the applicability and fruitfulness of this nonreductionist epistemological perspective. This account also bears (...) on questions of conceptual change and theory structure in philosophy of science. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, 831 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55455; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

“Functional homology” appears regularly in different areas of biological research and yet it is apparently a contradiction in terms—homology concerns identity of structure regardless of form and function. I argue that despite this conceptual tension there is a legitimate conception of ‘homology of function’, which can be recovered by utilizing a distinction from pre-Darwinian physiology (use versus activity) to identify an appropriate meaning of ‘function’. This account is directly applicable to molecular developmental biology and shares a connection to the theme (...) of hierarchy in homology. I situate ‘homology of function’ within existing definitions and criteria for structural assessments of homology, and introduce a criterion of ‘organization’ for judging function homologues, which focuses on hierarchically interconnected interdependencies (similar to relative position and connection for skeletal elements in structural homology). This analysis of biological concepts has at least three broad philosophical consequences: (1) it provides the grounds for the study of behavior and psychological categories as homologues; (2) it demonstrates that philosophers who take selected effect function as primary effectively ignore large portions of comparative, structural, and experimental research, thereby misconstruing biological reasoning and knowledge; and, (3) it underwrites causal generalizations, which illuminates inferences made from model organisms in experimental biology. (shrink)

Many philosophers of biology have embraced a version of pluralism in response to the failure of theory reduction but overlook how concepts, methods, and explanatory resources are in fact coordinated, such as in interdisciplinary research where the aim is to integrate different strands into an articulated whole. This is observable for the origin of evolutionary novelty—a complex problem that requires a synthesis of intellectual resources from different fields to arrive at robust answers to multiple allied questions. It is an apt (...) locus for exploring new dimensions of explanatory integration because it necessitates coordination among historical and experimental disciplines . These coordination issues are widespread for the origin of novel morphologies observed in the Cambrian Explosion. Despite an explicit commitment to an integrated, interdisciplinary explanation, some potential disciplinary contributors are excluded. Notable among these exclusions is the physics of ontogeny. We argue that two different dimensions of integration—data and standards—have been insufficiently distinguished. This distinction accounts for why physics-based explanatory contributions to the origin of novelty have been resisted: they do not integrate certain types of data and differ in how they conceptualize the standard of uniformitarianism in historical, causal explanations. Our analysis of these different dimensions of integration contributes to the development of more adequate and integrated explanatory frameworks. (shrink)