"Taken as a trilogy, _consent not to be a single being_ is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of _Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination_ In _The Universal Machine_—the concluding volume to his landmark trilogy _consent not to be a single being_—Fred Moten presents a suite of three essays on Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon in which (...) he explores questions of freedom, capture, and selfhood. In trademark style, Moten considers these thinkers alongside artists and musicians such as William Kentridge and Curtis Mayfield while interrogating the relation between blackness and phenomenology. Whether using Levinas's idea of escape in unintended ways, examining Arendt's antiblackness through Mayfield's virtuosic falsetto and Anthony Braxton's musical language, or showing how Fanon's form of phenomenology enables black social life, Moten formulates blackness as a way of being in the world that evades regulation. Throughout _The Universal Machine_—and the trilogy as a whole—Moten's theorizations of blackness will have a lasting and profound impact. (shrink)

"Taken as a trilogy, _consent not to be a single being_ is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."—Brent Hayes Edwards, author of _Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination_ In _Stolen Life_—the second volume in his landmark trilogy _consent not to be a single being_—Fred Moten undertakes an expansive exploration of blackness as it relates to black life and the collective refusal of (...) social death. The essays resist categorization, moving from Moten's opening meditation on Kant, Olaudah Equiano, and the conditions of black thought through discussions of academic freedom, writing and pedagogy, non-neurotypicality, and uncritical notions of freedom. Moten also models black study as a form of social life through an engagement with Fanon, Hartman, and Spillers and plumbs the distinction between blackness and black people in readings of Du Bois and Nahum Chandler. The force and creativity of Moten's criticism resonate throughout, reminding us not only of his importance as a thinker, but of the continued necessity of interrogating blackness as a form of sociality. (shrink)

Depuis Edward W. Said, les recherches sur le rapport entre discours et représentations idéologiques ont permis d’éclairer la situation postcoloniale en ouvrant un champ de recherche propre à revisiter la question de l’altérité. Depuis, dans cette même ligne, des études comme celles de Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak ont prolongé la réflexion en portant leur attention sur la condition des femmes dans les anciens pays colonisés. L’auteur de la présente contribution s’efforce, alors, en premier lieu, de montrer de quelle façon la philosophe (...) indienne utilise la déconstruction derridienne pour penser la question de la condition féminine indienne. Ensuite, il souligne comment sa lecture postcoloniale de la littérature contribue à revisiter l’histoire de l’indépendance et ses prolongements, en interrogeant la place des femmes, notamment les plus défavorisées. Enfin, après avoir rappelé les grandes lignes du texte «Can the subaltern speak?», largement commenté à travers le monde, Fred Poché propose quelques repères utiles pour la prise en compte de la parole des «subalternes». (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Exploring “Atlas Shrugged”: Ayn Rand’s Magnum Opus, Edward W. Younkins examines Rand’s 1957 novel as philosophy, literature, political economy, and business-education text. The book is constituted mostly by previously published essays. Despite some interpretive difficulties throughout, the introduction and appendix represent worthwhile additions to this collection.

Critics of Robert Nozick's libertarian political theory often allege that the theory in general and its account of property rights in particular lack sufficient foundations. A key difficulty is thought to lie in his account of how portions of the world which no one yet owns can justly come to be initially acquired. But the difficulty is illusory, because the concept of justice does not meaningfully apply to initial acquisition in the first place. Moreover, the principle of self-ownership provides a (...) solid foundation for Nozick's libertarianism, and when seen in the light of that principle and its full implications, the standard purported examples of injustices in acquisition are revealed to be nothing of the kind. Footnotesa The original draft of this paper was written in the summer of 2002 while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University. I thank the directors of the Center, Fred D. Miller, Jr., Ellen Frankel Paul, and Jeffrey Paul, for hosting me. I also thank colloquium audience members at Bowling Green State University for comments on that draft. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Logic of Probabilities in Hume's Argument against Miracles Fred Wilson The position is often stated that Hume's discussion of miracles is inconsistent with his views on the logical or ontological status oflaws ofnature and with his more general scepticism. Broad, for one, has so argued.1 Hume's views on induction are assumed to go somethinglike this. Any attempt to demonstrate knowledge ofmatters offact presupposes causal reasoning, but the (...) latter is based not on any perception of necessary connections, but on an unreasoned expectation that because events have been constantly conjoined in the past they will be constantly conjoined in the future. The fact that our past experience gives rise to certain expectations provides absolutely no reason to think that these expectations will be fulfilled. But this is forgotten as soon as he turns to the topic of miracles where the argument requires certain assumptions about laws of nature. Here he claims that the laws of nature arebased upon afirm andunalterable experience and dismisses what he apparently admits to be strong evidence for miracles on the basis of the claim that such events are absolutely impossible. The inconsistency between the discussion of miracles and the earlier discussions of induction and causality is clear. Nonetheless, there is a certain implausibility to this claim that makes it a difficult one to entertain seriously, since it is unlikely that a philosopher as careful as Hume would have failed to recognize the inconsistency if it existed. What I propose here to argue is that there is in fact no inconsistency, and that this becomes clear once one places the discussion ofmiracles in the broader context ofthe overall argument ofthe first Enquiry. In particular, the charge ofinconsistency disappears once one eliminates the caricature ofHume's views on causal reasoning upon which it rests. To come to grips with the discussion of miracles in Hume it is necessary to place that discussion in its historical context. In the generally empiricist atmosphere that developed in Britain following the mid-seventeenth century civil wars, the general defence of the reasonableness of Christianity consisted of two parts. First, it washeldthatrational argument, whether causal or teleological orboth, could yield a reasonable belief that a deity ofa more or less traditional sort existed. Then, second, in order to establish further that Jesus was the Son ofGod it was held that one could rely upon a chain oftestimony Volume XV Number 2 255 FRED WILSON leading back from the present to the past to infer the existence of miracles testifying to the divinity ofJesus. Hume attacks this second inference in the essay on miracles andthe first in the essay that follows in the Enquiries on God's particular providence (the themes of which are developed more fully in the Dialogues on Natural Religion). Given the central place that the appeal to miracles held in Christian apologetics in the 17th and 18th centuries, Hume's systematic attack on the argument from miracles constituted a clear attack on Christianity. To be sure, Hume's argument would never have persuaded JohnWesley, but that would hardly have surprised Hume himself, nor should it surprise us: those in the grips of religious enthusiasm, whether it be John Wesley or Jimmy Swaggart, will hardly be persuaded by rational argument, however much it is still true that they ought to be persuaded by it. The appeal to miracles tojustify specifically Christian beliefs had a long history. One can find it already in the late Roman period in Eusebius. Muslim thinkers were to challenge this traditional defence by arguing that chains oftestimony become more unreliable the longer they become. As for their own Islamic beliefs, these they admitted had also to be justified by an appeal to miracles, but there was, it was claimed, a unique self-justifying miracle in the Koran, the specially revealed Word of God. The critical theme of the Muslim apologists, that the longer a chain of testimony the less assurance it gives of the fact that a miracle had occurred, was developed in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries.6 It seems to have been introduced by the Oxford orientalist Edward Pocock who had discovered this line of Muslim apologetics while... (shrink)

The_ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ is the most ambitious international philosophy project in many years. Edited by Edward Craig and assisted by thirty specialist subject editors, the REP consists of ten volumes of the world's most eminent philosophers writing for the needs of students and teachers of philosophy internationally. The REP is a project on an unparalleled scale: Over 2000 entries ranging from 500 to 15,000 words in length - thematic, biographical and national 10 volumes consisting of over 5 million (...) words of text plus considerable bibliographic material A Chief Editor and thirty specialist Subject Editors from across the world Over 1200 authors from all over the world. The importance of the REP is not to be found just in the sheer size of the project but also in its breadth of subject matter. It covers: The core of most Anglo-American philosophy - the metaphysical, epistemological and logical questions The usual menu of ethics, political philosophy and the history of philosophy The philosophy of other cultures - from Chinese, Arabic and Jewish philosophy to the philosophy of Africa and Latin America The most impressive range of authors have been gathered together on this unique project: William Alston, Roderick Chisolm, Fred Dretske, Joel Feinberg, Sandra Harding, Larry Laudan, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Popkin, Richard Rorty, Alan Ryan, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephen Stich, Patrick Suppes and Bernard Williams, to name just a few. Also available online: www.rep.routledge.com. (shrink)

Small wonder: finitude and its horizons -- The underside of modernity: Adorno, Heidegger, and Dussel -- Empire or cosmopolis: civilization at the crossroads -- Confronting empire: a tribute to Arundhati Roy -- Speaking truth to power: in memory of Edward Said -- Critical intellectuals in a global age: toward a global public sphere -- Social identity and creative praxis: hommage á Merleau-Ponty -- Nature and artifact: Gadamer on human health -- Borders or horizons?: an older debate revisited -- Empire and (...) faith: sacred non-sovereignty -- Appendix: A. The dignity of difference: a salute to Jonathan Sacks -- B. Religion and rationality: Habermas and the early Frankfurt school -- Nomolatry and fidelity: a response to Charles Taylor. (shrink)

In this essay, Fred Dallmayr considers the writings and activism of Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and Power Politics. First, Dallmayr examines the proper role of the writer-activist, comparing Roy to Edward Said. For each, writing and politicsare neither separate nor are they independent of the writer’s distinctive being-in-the-world. He then examines her critique of corporate business and the war machine, especially in relation to the construction of destructive “mega-dams” in India. The privatization of public (...) services in India has done little to provide safe drinking water and electricity to some eighty percent of India’s rural population. Dallmayr finds in Roy an unmatched voice of hope and commitment to a more just, more humane future, sustained by a love that will not quit. (shrink)

This paper argues that happiness and pleasure are distinct states of mind because they stand in a distinct logical relation to belief. Roughly, being happy about a state of affairs s implies that one believes that s satisfies the description ‘s’ and that it is in some way good, whereas taking pleasure in s does not. In particular, Fred Feldman's analysis of happiness in terms of attitudinal pleasure overlooks this distinction.

In this provocative book, Fred Dretske argues that to achieve an understanding of the mind it is not enough to understand the biological machinery by means of...

The Nature of God explores a perennial problem in the philosophy of religion.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an open access, dynamic reference work designed to organize professional philosophers so that they can write, edit, and maintain a reference work in philosophy that is responsive to new research. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they (...) are made public. (shrink)

The disagreement over whether Aristotle recognized rights in some form unavoidably involves disagreement over what rights are, and the theory of rights itself is still highly contested. There is no consensus concerning how " right'? is to be defined, how rights are to be theoretically grounded, or how rights theory is to be applied in particular circumstances. This is not, however, a good reason to dismiss the issue of whether there are rights in Aristotle: for Aristotle, like modern rights theorists, (...) is concerned about the moral and legal status of the individual within the community, and he expresses this in terms of claims of justice. The issue is worthy of study not only because it can lead to a deeper understanding of Aristotle's conceptions of justice and the common good, but also because it may shed valuable light on the theoretical foundations of human rights, since he offers a theory of political justice which is based on a metaphysical theory of human nature. (shrink)

L'auteur décrit l'ambivalence du rapport qu'entretient E. Levinas avec la théologie, montre que la pensée de ce philosophe ne se réduit pas à une philosophie de l'autre, de l'extériorité mais qu'elle se pose comme une véritable défense de la subjectivité, et s'interroge sur l'utilisation de cette pensée dans le cadre d'une théologie chrétienne.

First published in 1903, this volume revolutionized philosophy and forever altered the direction of ethical studies. A philosopher’s philosopher, G. E. Moore was the idol of the Bloomsbury group, and Lytton Strachey declared that Principia Ethica marked the rebirth of the Age of Reason. This work clarifies some of moral philosophy’s most common confusions and redefines the science’s terminology. Six chapters explore: the subject matter of ethics, naturalistic ethics, hedonism, metaphysical ethics, ethics in relation to conduct, and the ideal. Moore's (...) simplicity of style and precise use of everyday language exercised an enormous influence on the development of analytic philosophy, and they contribute to the continuing resonance of his compelling arguments. (shrink)

"This anthology of writings by prominent black thinkers from antiquity to the present makes the case for a central tradition of black philosophy, rooted in Africa and distinct from the intellectual heritage of the West."--From publisher description.

Passages in Leibniz which have been understood to contain his statement of Leibniz law do not in fact contain any statement of that principle. Some of these passages contain a statement of the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, While others contain a statement of a principle about concept identity. The latter principle states that a concept, A, Is identical with a concept, B, If and only if a can be substituted for b in any proposition without change of truth (...) value. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century theologian_Jonathan Edwards remains a significant influence on modern religion, and this book constitutes his most important contribution to Christian thought. Edwards_raises timeless questions about desire, choice, good, and evil, contrasting the opposing Calvinist and Arminian views of free will and addressing issues related to God's foreknowledge, determinism, and moral agency.

Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, (...) we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, _The Multivoiced Body_ offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality. (shrink)

In this compilation of popular lectures delivered in 1964, Hoyle comments on the nature of the scientific enterprise, gives his view of life on Earth from the perspective of astronomy, and speculates about the future.

Clinical research under the usual regulatory constraints may be difficult or even impossible in a public health emergency. Regulators must seek to strike a good balance in granting as wide therapeutic access to new drugs as possible at the same time as gathering sound evidence of safety and effectiveness. To inform current policy, I reexamine the philosophical rationale for restricting new medicines to clinical trials, at any stage and for any population of patients (which resides in the precautionary principle), to (...) show that its objective to protect public health, now or in the future, could soon be defeated in a pandemic. Providing wider therapeutic access and coordinating observations and natural experiments, including service delivery by cluster (wedged cluster trials), may provide such a balance. However, there are important questions of fairness to resolve before any such research can proceed. (shrink)

Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, (...) we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, _The Multivoiced Body_ offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality. (shrink)