First Amendment issues have long bedevilled American jurisprudence. There are several areas of Professor Oderberg's fine paper where the witches are bewitching and where I find myself in disagreement with him. I choose to focus on what he calls ‘mere sincerity’. He worries that this sincerity leads to absurdity, but he fails to appreciate why it also protects central moral concerns. The basic issue Oderberg addresses is whether and how the state should avoid forcing people to do what those people (...) think is wrong. On the one hand, the state could say, ‘You will not be required to do “whatever” you personally believe is wrong. Thus, if you sincerely think taxes are wrong, you are not required to pay them.’ On the other hand, the state could say, ‘Whatever you think about the ethics of taxes is irrelevant. Rather, you must pay.’ It is a matter of indifference to the government why one pays taxes, whether sincerely out of a sense of social justice or merely out of fear. But problems arise when people have moral or religious objections for not complying with government mandates. In religious and conscience matters, the gravitational pull of absolutisms tends to rip actions out of government control. As Jesus's disciples protested: …. (shrink)

Love is religious love to the degree that it cooperates with God's love. Interpretations of God's love and what it would mean to participate in God's love rest on deeper and sometimes divergent conceptualizations of God and God's relation to the world. Agape is an essential feature of Christian life, but it does not follow that it is the distinctive form of Christian love. It is not equally privileged in all Christian theological traditions. Within the framework of Roman Catholic theology, (...) a full understanding of God's love requires appeal to all three relationships that we know under the names of philia, agape, and eros. The most inclusive of these is not agape but philia. (shrink)

Catholic natural law has had a long and evolving interest in bioethics. Thomas Aquinas left natural law a legacy of great flexibility in evaluating goods within a whole life. He also bequeathed to the Church the basis for an abolutism on sexual issues. Modern reproductive medicine and a deeper understanding of human freedom have reopened these issues. The Vatican has developed new, holistic arguments to proscribe reproductive interventions, but critics remain unconvinced that marital relationships and goods have been adequately evaluated. (...) The resolution of this debate will require further experience and reflection. Keywords: Thomas Aquinas, freedom, natural law, reproductive ethics CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

AS BABY BOOMERS BEGIN TO REACH RETIREMENT AGE IN 2010, THEY ARE faced with the prospect of twenty to thirty postwork years. Should this period have any goals or purpose other than be a very long vacation? Four gerontological theories propose alternative priorities for this time: continuity, new start, disengagement, and completion. Each has a place within a full life. Careful consideration of each theory exposes how certain vices and virtues mutate during this "third age" of life: integrity and dissipation; (...) self-gratification and generosity; repentance, humility, and denial; and trust and detachment. (shrink)

Recent work on the ethics of love may be divided into norm-centered and affective-centered approaches. Norm-centered approaches, exemplified by Hallett and Outka, argue for either moral parity between self and other or for self-subordination; they regard self-love as legitimate within strict boundaries; and they sharply distinguish agape from other forms of love. Affective-centered approaches, exemplified by Vacek and Post, con- centrate on love for God as the central context for neighbor-love; they ac- cord a high status to friendship, marriage, (...) and other primary relationships; and they regard all forms of love as Christian in that they are transformed by grace and constitute cooperation with God. The re- maining agenda for both approaches is primarily theological, including especially the need to develop an extended application of the doctrines of creation and grace for the status of "special relations" in the ethics of love. (shrink)

Ethics & Behavior, Volume 21, Issue 5, Page 428-430, September-October 2011.

Did the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. cause the values of teenagers in the U.S. to change? Did their previously important self-esteem and self-actualization values become less important and their survival and safety values become more important? Changes in the values of teenagers are important for practitioners, managers, marketers, and researchers to understand because high school students are our current and future employees, managers, and customers, and research has shown that values impact work and consumer-related attitudes and (...) behaviors. Further, studies that compared higher to lower performing for-profit and not-for-profit companies have found that higher performing organizations had strong values that permeated their organizations [Collins J. C., and J. I. Porras: 1994, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York, Harper Business); O’Reilly, C. A. and J. A. Chatman: 1996, in B. M. Staw and L. L. Cummings (eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 18 (JAI Press, Greenwhich, CT), pp. 157–200; O’Reilly, C. A.: 1989, California Management Review 31(4), 9–25; Posner, B. Z., and W. H. Schmidt: 1996, Public Personnel Management, 25(3), 277–298; Rousseau, D.: 1990, Group and Organization Studies 15(4), 448–460; Schein, E. H.: 2004, Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco, Jossey Bass)]. While one study of adults found value changes, no known studies have explored if the values of teenagers also changed post-9/11. This study filled that research gap by exploring the values of a random sample of 1000 U.S. teenagers in grades 9 to 12 pre- and post-9/11, using a demographic questionnaire and the Rokeach Value Survey. The research results indicated that teenage survival, safety, and security values (a world at peace, freedom, national security, and salvation) increased in importance while their self-esteem and self-actualization values (a sense of accomplishment, inner harmony, pleasure, self-respect, and wisdom) decreased in importance, mirroring the changes for adults. The meaning of these findings for practitioners, managers, marketers and researchers was discussed. (shrink)

Scholars of religion and science have generated remarkable scholarship in recent years in their explorations of love. Exactly how scholars involved in this budding field believe that love and science should relate and/or be integrated varies greatly. What they share in common is the belief that issues of love are of paramount importance and that the various scientific disciplines—whether natural, social, or religious—must be brought to bear upon how best to understand love. I briefly introduce the emergence of the love‐and‐science (...) research program and note that scholars have not done well defining what they mean by love. I suggest that the present surge in love scholarship will fail to produce the positive results that it otherwise might if love is not defined well. I provide and defend a definition of love adequate for those doing love‐and‐science research: To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote well‐being. To explain better what this simple definition entails, I explore its three main phrases. Love is said to have many forms, but agape is the form to which the love‐and‐science literature most commonly refers. I comment briefly on the debates about how to best understand agape, noting sixteen different definitions proposed by major scholars. I identify weaknesses in many of them and then offer what I argue is a more adequate definition of agape as intentional response to promote well‐being when confronted by that which generates ill‐being. In short, agape repays evil with good. While research on love and science requires much more than adequate definitions, I believe that the definitions I proffer can prove useful in furthering the love‐and‐science research program. (shrink)

More than 50 years after it was first published, The Concept of Law remains the most important work of legal philosophy in the English-speaking world. In this volume, written for both students and specialists, 13 leading scholars look afresh at Hart's great book. Unique in format, the volume proceeds sequentially through all the main ideas in The Concept of Law: each contributor addresses a single chapter of Hart's book, critically discussing its arguments in light of subsequent developments in the field. (...) Four concluding essays assess the continued relevance for jurisprudence of the 'persistent questions' identified by Hart at the beginning of The Concept of Law. The collection also includes Hart's 'Answers to Eight Questions', written in 1988 and never before published in English. Contributors include Timothy Endicott, Richard HS Tur, Pavlos Eleftheriadis, John Gardner, Grant Lamond, Nicos Stavropoulos, Leslie Green, John Tasioulas, Jeremy Waldron, John Finnis, Frederick Schauer, Pierluigi Chiassoni and Nicola Lacey. (shrink)

In this imaginative and comprehensive study, Edward Casey, one of the most incisive interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition, offers a philosophical history of the evolving conceptualizations of place and space in Western thought. Not merely a presentation of the ideas of other philosophers, _The Fate of Place_ is acutely sensitive to silences, absences, and missed opportunities in the complex history of philosophical approaches to space and place. A central theme is the increasing neglect of place in favor of (...) space from the seventh century A.D. onward, amounting to the virtual exclusion of place by the end of the eighteenth century. Casey begins with mythological and religious creation stories and the theories of Plato and Aristotle and then explores the heritage of Neoplatonic, medieval, and Renaissance speculations about space. He presents an impressive history of the birth of modern spatial conceptions in the writings of Newton, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant and delineates the evolution of twentieth-century phenomenological approaches in the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger. In the book's final section, Casey explores the postmodern theories of Foucault, Derrida, Tschumi, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray. (shrink)

In the course of his long development, Kant's concept of matter changed somewhat, while his concept of scientific explanation changed considerably. Both developments achieved a coherent integration in Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Using this developmental background, the present paper argues that the Foundations should be interpreted as an attempted rational reconstruction of the mechanics of Newton and Euler. Kant attempted to do this by constructing a concept of matter that would confer a Leibnizian intelligibility on Newtonian mechanics, and (...) also accord with Kant's theories on the nature of concepts and their role in scientific explanation. (shrink)

I attempt to solve a problematic feature of Scheler's intentional feeling. Spiritual feelings are disembodied and elements of William James's pragmatism offer a way to make elements of Scheler's phenomenology more concrete than Scheler's phenomenology allows. I then further develop this insight since contact between both Scheler and James opens up possible trajectories and affinities that, in the end, reveal both thinkers share an affective underpinning to their respective metaphysics. In both thinkers, reality is given as felt. As such, this (...) underpinning becomes a basis for interpreting Scheler's later metaphysics through Jamesian pragmatism. (shrink)

Is the purpose of political philosophy to articulate the moral values that political regimes would realize in a virtually perfect world and show what that implies for the way we should behave toward one another? That model of political philosophy, driven by an effort to draw a picture of an ideal political society, is familiar from the approach of John Rawls and others. Or is political philosophy more useful if it takes the world as it is, acknowledging the existence of (...) various morally non-ideal political realities, and asks how people can live together nonetheless? The latter approach is advocated by “realist” thinkers in contemporary political philosophy. In Value, Conflict, and Order, Edward Hall builds on the work of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams in order to establish a political realist’s theory of politics for the twenty-first century. The realist approach, Hall argues, helps us make sense of the nature of moral and political conflict, the ethics of compromising with adversaries and opponents, and the character of political legitimacy. In an era when democratic political systems all over the world are riven by conflict over values and interests, Hall’s conception is bracing and timely. (shrink)

This is a book grounded in the real ethical challenges of modern business practice, with a world-religious perspective so necessary in an era of globalization.

The problem of the one and the many is central to ancient Greek philosophy, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to Aristotle's treatment of it in the Metaphysics. The Central Books of the Metaphysics are widely recognised as the most difficult portion of a most difficult work. This title aims to examine the Central Books.

This article investigates the nature of Aristotelian syllogistics and shows that the categorical syllogism is fundamentally about showing the connection, in the premises of the syllogism, between the major and minor terms as stated in the conclusion. It discusses how this is important for the use of the syllogism in scientific demonstration. The article then examines modern deductive logic with an eye to they way in which it contrasts with Aristotelian syllogistics. It shows howmodern logic is about making necessary connections (...) between each proposition by means of external or second order rules. In the syllogism, on the other hand, the necessity between the premises as a whole unit and the conclusion is based on the internal middle term. The article concludes with a discussion of Günther Patzig’s claim that Aristotelian syllogisms are best thought of as tautological propositions. If this were the case, then the differences asserted to exist between syllogistic and modern logic would not hold. However, it is shown that Patzig’s assimilation of syllogistics to modern deductive logic is illegitimate. (shrink)

This article investigates the nature of Aristotelian syllogistics and shows that the categorical syllogism is fundamentally about showing the connection, in the premises of the syllogism, between the major and minor terms as stated in the conclusion. It discusses how this is important for the use of the syllogism in scientific demonstration. The article then examines modern deductive logic with an eye to they way in which it contrasts with Aristotelian syllogistics. It shows howmodern logic is about making necessary connections (...) between each proposition by means of external or second order rules. In the syllogism, on the other hand, the necessity between the premises as a whole unit and the conclusion is based on the internal middle term. The article concludes with a discussion of Günther Patzig’s claim that Aristotelian syllogisms are best thought of as tautological propositions. If this were the case, then the differences asserted to exist between syllogistic and modern logic would not hold. However, it is shown that Patzig’s assimilation of syllogistics to modern deductive logic is illegitimate. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an account of the conceptual shift that occurs between the work completed by Gilles Deleuze prior to 1969 and his later work with Félix Guattari, beginning in 1972 with Anti-Oedipus. Against previous interpretations, which have concentrated on the developments initiated by Deleuze, I argue for the primary importance of Guattari's influence, especially his insistence on a theory of “machinic processes.” The importance of these processes is made manifest in Deleuze and Guattari's move away from theories (...) of structuralism. In order to carry out this task, I offer a close reading of Guattari's essay “Machine and Structure.” This essay was first written as a review of Deleuze's acclaimed work in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense and formed the basis for Deleuze and Guattari's first meeting. In the concluding sections of the paper, I show how the integration of the concept of the machine allows Deleuze and Guattari to develop a theory of the unconscious that operates outside of the boundaries traditionally set by structuralist analysis. (shrink)

The paper was read at the Colloquium ‘Après Maréchal’ , organised in memory of the philosopher J. Maréchal. In the first half of the paper the author develops the fundamental tenet of Maréchal’s philosophy: an attempt to go beyond the philosophy of Kant by using the transcendental method. The author bears witness of this attempt by criticising and transforming the transcendental method itself. For unavoidably the question arises in what way transcendental philosophy can justify a philosophical reflection. In the second (...) half of the paper experiences are described which suggest that other ways than the transcendental method and reflection are to be explored if philosophical research is to be fruitful: the experiences of faith, evil, culture, art and of the individual person. A new kind of reflection seems necessary, less intellectual and more “biological”, where thinking and life are linked together, allowing us to talk about such a thing as a “physical faith”. (shrink)

At this point I should say something about one of the frequent criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of Europe’s inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method, and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the matters I’ve been discussing so far, and while (...) I have no desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the topic at hand.What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an adversarial critique not only of the field’s perspective and political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable. Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “An Ideology of Difference”. (shrink)

The natural interpretation is that Dorothea’s early impressions of Edward Casaubon, in terms of John Locke, are illusory. But I draw attention to Joseph Raz’s suggestion that it is the status of Locke which is mistaken, though I favour the natural interpretation.

Kant is widely acknowledged as the greatest philosopher of modern times. He undertook his famous critical turn to save human freedom and morality from the challenge of determinism and materialism. Intertwined with his metaphysical interests, however, he also had theological commitments, which have received insufficient attention. He believed that man is a fallen creature and in need of ‘redemption’. He intended to provide a fortress protecting religious faith from the failure of rationalist metaphysics, from the atheistic strands of the Enlightenment, (...) from the new mathematical science of nature, and from the dilemmas of Christian theology itself. Kant was an epistemologist, a philosopher of mind, a metaphysician of experience, an ethicist and a philosopher of religion. But all this was sustained by his religious faith. This book aims to recover the focal point and inner contradictions of his thought, the ‘secret thorn’ of his metaphysics. It first locates Kant in the tradition of reflection on the human weakness from Luther to Hume, and then engages in a critical, but charitable, manner with Kant’s entire pre-critical work, including his posthumous fragments. Special attention is given to The Only Possible Ground, one of the most difficult, interesting and underestimated of Kant’s works. The book takes its cue from an older approach to Kant, but also engages with recent Anglophone and continental scholarship, and deploys modern analytical tools to make sense of Kant. What emerges is an innovative and thought-provoking interpretation of Kant’s metaphysics, set against the background of forgotten religious aspects of European philosophy. (shrink)

In this powerful new study Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Derrida from a historical perspective and drawing on new archival sources, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy shows how Derrida's thought arose in the closely contested space of post-war French intellectual life, developing in response to Sartrian existentialism, religious philosophy and the structuralism that found its base at the École Normale Supe;rieure. In a (...) history of the philosophical movements and academic institutions of post-war France, Baring paints a portrait of a community caught between humanism and anti-humanism, providing a radically new interpretation of the genesis of deconstruction and of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times. (shrink)

This essay examines recent attempts to defend holenmerism, or the ‘whole in every part’ doctrine, as the preferred view of God’s relationship to the material world in the work of Descartes. By focusing on the interrelationship between space, matter, and immaterial entities in Cartesian philosophy, I will demonstrate that the textual evidence not only fails to provide support for the holenmerist revival, but that holenmerism also runs counter to many of Descartes’s concepts regarding space and bodily extension.