Contre Rousseau, Yves Simon a exposé les raisons essentielles pour l'autorité. L'obéissance, à la loi que l'autorité définit ne consiste pas simplement à s'obéir à soi. Ce n'est pas non plus un acte irrationnel. St. Thomas a montré qu'en plus de la loi éternelle et naturelle, nous avons besoin de loi humaine positive. La loi humaine est elle-même oeuvre de prudence et de commandement. Dans la tradition chrétienne, l'obéissance est une vertu. Elle est mystérieuse en ce qu'elle indique une forme (...) plus haute de rationalité et de sagesse. Celui qui obéit la loi peut comprendre à la fois sa nécessité et le fait qu'elle présente au moins une alternative valable en vue du bien commun. (shrink)

Organic evolution, or change, among the diatoms has proceeded with considerable regularity. The origins, the extinctions, and the increases in numbers of species and genera, on the whole, have submitted to law and order, as rules-within-limits . The changes of evolution have followed from two sorts of phenomena — 1) the origin and extinction of shortlived or unstable species, in a proportion which has been more or less constant, but different in the two groups of diatoms, Centricae and Pennatae; these (...) short-lived species died out in the subperiod of their origin even under favourable enough environment or surrounding conditions, because of the innate instability of these particular species: and 2) the origin of new species which demonstrated their innate capacity for permanence by remaining in the living condition from their origins mostly up to the present time. The continued or continual additions of new and long-living species, in proportion to the number available as possible and parental species, has given the geometrical progressions.Consequently evolution in the diatoms has been monopodial, or one-stemmed, and not sympodial or not with many substitutions of one species after another in successions. The two kinds of species-durations are well-known in other classes of plants and animals. Exactly the same processes of additions, subtractions, and multiplications, particularly as found in the centric diatoms, are very probable in these classes of plants and animals which have given the same answer or arithmetical result for the whole of their previous histories, in the form of the frequency distribution of the present sizes of their genera.The rules-within-limits of this basic evolution are described, defined, and discussed in their relations to various theories of evolution which perhaps only concern the working of factors of superimposed modifications that reduce the results of the pattern or plan of basic evolution.Die phylogenetische Entwicklung wurde im Bereich der Kieselalgen von bestimmten Gesetzmässigkeiten beherrscht. Die Entstehung neuer Arten und Gattungen, ihr Wiederverschwinden und die Zunahme des Formenreichtums, resultierend aus der Zahl der neuentstandenen, vermindert um die der wieder verschwindenen Arten und Gattungen und vollzog sich nach Regeln , die durch folgende Phänomene gekennzeichnet sind: Zwischen der Zahl der neuentstehenden und der Zahl der in der gleichen geologischen Subperiode aus inneren Gründen wieder aussterbenden Arten besteht eine mehr oder wenig feste Beziehung. Diese ist für die Centricae und Pennatae verschieden. Ein bestimmter Anteil der neuentstandenen Arten und Gattungen erwies sich aus inneren Gründen als „ausdauernd” und blieb bis auf den heutigen Tag erhalten. Die Zunahme der Arten- Zahl durch das Hinzukommen langlebiger Formen war stetig und vollzog sich nach Massgabe geometrischer Progressionen.Diese Tatsachen führen zu dem Schluss, dass die phylogenetische Entwicklung der Kieselalgen nach monopodialem, und nicht nach sympodialem Muster vorsichging. Auch in andern Pflanzengruppen und im Tierreich durften die gleichen Gesetzmässigkeiten herrschend sein. Am klarsten gelangen sie bei den Centricae zum, Ausdruck und werden vom Autor als das Fazit von Additions-, Subtraktions-, und Multiplikationsprozessen aufgefasst. Die heutige Situation bezüglich Häufigkeit der Grössen der Gattungen, in Zahl der Arten, ist das Endergebnis der summativen Wirkung dieser Einzelprozesse.Diese als ‚rules-within-limits’ bezeichneten Gesetzmässigkeiten werden im einzelnen beschrieben, erklärt und zusammenfassend dargestellt. Zu andern Evolutionstheorien in Beziehung gebracht, werden sie schliesslich für Erörterung des Problems benutzt, inwieweit noch andere evolutionsgeschichtliche Prozesse als übergeordnete Faktoren in den vom Verfasser dargestellten Grundplan des Evolutionsgeschehens eingreifen können.L'évolution organique ou le changement parmi les Diatomées s'est effectué avec une régularité considérable. Les origines et les extinctions, et les accroissements des nombres des espèces et des genres, se sont soumis en tout aux lois et aux ordres, commes des régularités à l'intérieur de légères déviations. Le changement de l'évolution fut la conséquence de deux sortes de phénomène: l'origine et l'extinction des espèces éphémères dans une proportion plus ou moins déterminée mais différente pour les deux classes des Diatomées, Centricae et Pennatae; ces espèces éphémères moururent dans la subpériode de leur origines malgré le caractère assez favorable des circonstances environnantes, à cause de l'évanescence inhérente aux espèces particulières, et l'origine des espèces nouvelles qui démontrèrent leur qualité innée de permanence tout en continuant de vivre depuis leurs origines, pour la plupart, jusqu'à présent. Les additions continuelles d'espèces nouvelles et permanentes, en nombres proportionnés aux nombres disponibles comme espèces parentes et possibles, donnèrent des accroissements par progressions géométriques.Par conséquent, l'évolution parmi les Diatomées fut monopodiale et non pas sympodiale. Les deux sortes d'espèces-durées sont bien connues parmi beaucoup d'autres classes de plantes et d'animaux. Les mêmes procédés d'additions, de soustractions et de multiplications, particulièrement tels qu'on les trouve dans les Centricae, sont très probables pour ces classes de plantes et d'animaux qui ont donné un résultat le plus semblable pour la somme totale de leur histoire précédente, sous la forme de la répartition des fréquences de leurs grandeurs générique actuelles.Les régularités à l'intérieur de légères déviations de cette évolution fondamentale sont détaillées, définies et discutées dans leurs relations aux diverses théories touchant les autres méthodes de l'évolution qui jouent le rôle de facteurs modifiants superposés au dessin général ou au dessein de l'évolution fondamentale. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 119-135MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Evaluating Klossowski's Le BaphometIan JamesLiterature, under historical conditions which are not simply linguistic, has come to occupy a place which is always open to a kind of subversive juridicity. [...] This subversive juridicity supposes that self-identity is never assured or reassuring.—Jacques Derrida, "Préjugés: Devant la loi"The ControversyOn 14 June 1965, Roger Caillois resigned from the jury of the prestigious Prix des Critiques. (...) His resignation was provoked by the majority decision of the jury to award the critics' prize that year to Klossowski's final novel, Le Baphomet.1 Le Baphomet, a singular, Walter Scott-inspired tale about the Knights Templar, is set, initially at least, at the beginning of the fourteenth century just before the dissolution of the Templar Order at the behest of the then French king, Philippe Le Bel. After the historical prologue the action is transferred to a seemingly atemporal sphere, where the disembodied souls of the former Knights Templar await the moment when the Last Judgment will be pronounced and they will be reunited once more with their earthly bodies. The setting, tone, and style are at first gothic, but with the appearance of the disembodied spirit of Saint Teresa of Avila baroque elements begin to dominate and to mix with evocations of Masonic and esoteric ritual, Gnostic heresy, and theological but also philosophical discussion. These are accompanied by the appearance of Philippe le Bel himself and the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, the "Antichrist," initially in the form of an anteater. With its unorthodox and often archaic vocabulary and syntax and, after the historical prologue, its discontinuous and fantastical narrative presentation, in which the boundaries between persons and identities appear permeable and insecure, Le Baphomet engages the reader in a textual experience that can be both baffling and obscure. It is also a work that can appear to lack any intellectual or formal coherence, one whose multiplicity and evident complexity may seem to promise rich possibilities of interpretation and literary value but whose narrative disorder and stylistic singularity can ultimately leave the reader frustrated with the sense of having been exposed to something of a literary mess.This, at least, was the view of Roger Caillois when he resigned in protest at the decision of the Prix des Critiques jury to confer its honor on Klossowski's novel. Caillois was himself a singular writer whose work can be situated at the intersection of a [End Page 119][Begin Page 120]number of disciplines, including mythology, sociology, aesthetics, biology, and literary criticism. He had known Klossowski since 1936, when they collaborated along with Georges Bataille and others in the antifascist avant-garde grouping Contre-Attaque and then later, again with Bataille, on the review Acéphale and in the Collège de sociologie.2 Defending his resignation from the Prix des Critiques jury a few days after the event, Caillois published an article in Le Monde in which he drew attention to what he saw as Le Baphomet's primary weakness: its poor formal organization and in particular what he perceived as its stylistic insufficiency and grammatical inaccuracy.3 Perhaps with the desire to avoid accusations of prudery or Puritanism he denied that the content of the work was the cause of his disapproval. The infatuation of certain Knights Templar with an adolescent page, Ogier de Beaséant, oblique references to possible acts of sodomy, together with the stylized description of scenes involving mutilation, penetration, and ejaculation are all elements of the narrative. On the content of the work Caillois writes: "Some may see in this a novelistic exposé of an original and subtle theology, others only mystico-pederastic rubbish. For a literary prize I hold solely to the literary value of a work." According to Caillois the content of such a work may be interesting or absurd depending on one's tastes but has nothing to do with its literary value. The invocation of literary value, here, necessarily implies a set of criteria for the judgment of the standing of a work... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 3-6MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Whispers of the Flesh Essays in Memory of Pierre KlossowskiIan JamesRussell Ford Pierre Klossowski—novelist, essayist, painter, and translator—was one of the most startling, original, and influential figures in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. The older brother of the well-known painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski's diverse oeuvre includes novels, philosophical essays, and translations, as well as paintings and films. (...) Confined thus far to an undeserved but somehow fitting shadow existence in the margins and notes of theorists who have become mainstays of Anglo-American criticism, Klossowski's own work has increasingly become a focus of critical interest for its decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onward. Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish émigrés, Klossowski spent his first ten years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neoimpressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, the author of an important monograph on Daumier. His mother, Baladine, was also a painter and trained under Bonnard. While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to the novelist André Gide. At eighteen he became Gide's secretary and assisted him with the drafts of his famous novel Les faux-monnayeurs.Not until 1930, however, did Klossowski's own career properly begin, when he translated with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator from both German and Latin into French, translating amongst others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine, and Tertullian from the Latin. While working for the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst René Laforgue, Klossowski published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue française de la psychanalyse. Scandalized by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, Laforgue dismissed Klossowski immediately. Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friendships and acquaintances, most importantly with Georges Bataille, but also many others, including Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Maurice Heine. During this period he published several articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acéphale and in the avant-garde experiment of the Collège de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane). During the war years Klossowski trained in a number of Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La vocation suspendue. In the postwar period he married [End Page 3] a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbrück for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting. After the war Klossowski began to publish the influential works for which he will chiefly be remembered: literary-philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche (among others), as well as six important novels written between 1950 and 1965, La vocation suspendue (1950), the three works, originally published separately, which went on to form the Lois de l'hospitalité trilogy—Roberte ce soir (1954), La révocation de l'Édit de Nantes (1959) and Le souffleur ou le théâtre de société (1960)‚—and, finally, Le Baphomet (1965).Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain, was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a decisive break from earlier accounts. Whereas earlier treatments of Sade had focused either on biographical detail or on the medical and psychosexual import of his life and writing, Klossowski's reading was concerned with the intertwined figures of law and transgression in Sade's work. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers... (shrink)

Every Thing Must Go aruges that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it ...

The ancient philosophical school of Epicureanism tried to argue that death is "nothing to us." Were they right? James Warren provides a comprehensive study and articulation of the interlocking arguments against the fear of death found not only in the writings of Epicurus himself, but also in Lucretius' poem De rerum natura and in Philodemus' work De morte. These arguments are central to the Epicurean project of providing ataraxia (freedom from anxiety) and therefore central to an understanding of Epicureanism (...) as a whole. They also offer significant resources for modern discussions of the value of death--one which stands at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics. If death is the end of the subject, and the subject can not be benefited nor harmed after death, is it reasonable nevertheless to fear the ceasing-to-be? If the Epicureans are not right to claim that the dead can neither be benefited nor harmed, what alternative models might be offered for understanding the harm done by death and do these alternatives suffer from any further difficulties? The discussion involves consideration of both ethical and metaphysical topics since it requires analysis not only of the nature of a good life but also the nature of personal identity and time. A number of modern philosophers have offered criticisms or defences of the Epicureans' views. Warren explores and evaluates these in the light of a systematic and detailed study of the precise form and intention of the Epicureans' original arguments. Warren argues that the Epicureans also were interested in showing that mortality is not to be regretted and that premature death is not to be feared. Their arguments for these conclusions are to be found in their positive conception of the nature of a good and complete life, which divorce the completeness of a life as far as possible from considerations of its duration. Later chapters investigate the nature of a life lived without the fear of death and pose serious problems for the Epicureans being able to allow any concern for the post mortem future and being able to offer a positive reason for prolonging a life which is already complete in their terms. (shrink)

This is the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source of his vital philosophy of the event.James Williams explains the originality of Deleuze's work with careful definitions of all his innovative terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs. This reading makes connections to his ground-breaking work on literature, to his critical but also progressive relation to the sciences, and to (...) his controversial denial of the priority of standard logics, human values and 'meaning' in thinking.This book will open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. (shrink)

One feature of language is that we are able to make mistakes in our use of language. Amongst other sorts of mistakes, we can misspeak, misspell, missign, or misunderstand. Given this, it seems that our metaphysics of words should be flexible enough to accommodate such mistakes. It has been argued that a nominalist account of words cannot accommodate the phenomenon of misspelling. I sketch a nominalist trope-bundle view of words that can.

A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophyBy critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.

Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it's about "how we ought to live"-and why. It would be helpful if we could begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is. Unfortunately, we cannot. There are many rival theories, each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally, and any definition that goes beyond Socrates's simple formula-tion is bound to offend at least one of them. (...) This should make us cautious, but it need not paralyze us. In this chapter, I will describe the "minimum conception" of morality. (shrink)

Do Quine and Carnap distort the social nature of inquiry by privileging individual epistemic subjects? This objection is at the heart of Donald Davidson’s claim that Quine fails to grasp the significance of the concept of truth. In Carnap’s case, the objection may be detected in Charles Morris’s call to ground scientific philosophy in semiotics, the science of signs, rather than syntax, the formal investigation of languages. Drawing out the challenge from Morris’s proposal requires examining a neglected influence on this (...) neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. I argue that Morris and Davidson can both be understood as demanding that scientific philosophers socialize their conception of objectivity. (shrink)

This article revisits the hope of the First and Fourth Missiological Institute (MI) consultations in 1965 and 1967 regarding the survival of African Spirituality as relevant to the daily life of South African churches. African Spirituality has played a significant role in the cultural context of Africans. In the African context, African Spirituality is intertwined with life, death, and health, which co-exist with material aspects and the economy as gracious gifts from God. The churches in South Africa and elsewhere in (...) Africa have been challenged by the African worldview of healing and culture. Thus, Africans mostly prefer the African-centred church with more African Christianity, instead of Western Christianity. This has been a serious challenge in African church circles for centuries, even in the current 21st century. The question therefore arises whether this is a matter for the Africanisation, indigenisation, and decolonisation of the church in Africa. CONTRIBUTION: The article analyses the two MI consultations and whether the church in the 21st century has Africanised and decolonised itself in service of its African members. The study is a historical approach given the history of the MI's contribution in South Africa. The concept of African Spirituality is unpacked and contextualised within the African Independent Churches' (AIC) Zionist type churches such as the Zion Christian Church (ZCC), the St John's Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM), and other Ethiopian type churches such as Lutheran Bapedi Church and others in South Africa and African Traditional Religions (ATR). The article engages the importance of how African Spirituality differs from other spiritualities within the context of Christian spirituality. (shrink)

In its simplest form, hedonism about aesthetic value, the standard account of aesthetic normativity, holds that an object’s aesthetic value is the value it possesses in virtue of its capacity to provide aesthetic pleasure. I argue that hedonism cannot be true because it cannot reconcile itself with our concern to make true aesthetic judgments. Then I argue for an alternative account of aesthetic normativity that is not only consistent with that concern but the very expression of it. The argument for (...) the alternative account largely consists of arguments against two theses associated with Kant: subjectivism, which holds that the ascription of aesthetic value to an object depends on the sentiments of the subject making the ascription and not on the subject’s recognition of a property residing in the object, and disinterestedness, which holds that the ascription of beauty to an object neither depends on nor results in the subject’s having a motive to act in regard to the object. -/- . (shrink)

This book offers a systematic attempt to explore the point of convergance between feminist theory and the work of Michel Foucault.

Founded on in-depth biblical studies and perceptive theological perspective, James Thobaben's book has given us a comprehensive treatment of the myriad ethical ...

The identity and diversity of individual objects may be grounded or ungrounded, and intrinsic or contextual. Intrinsic individuation can be grounded in haecceities, or absolute discernibility. Contextual individuation can be grounded in relations, but this is compatible with absolute, relative or weak discernibility. Contextual individuation is compatible with the denial of haecceitism, and this is more harmonious with science. Structuralism implies contextual individuation. In mathematics contextual individuation is in general primitive. In physics contextual individuation may be grounded in relations via (...) weak discernibility. (shrink)

A radical approach to the environment which argues that by harnessing the power of science for human benefit, we can have a healthier planet As a prizewinning theoretical physicist and an outspoken advocate for scientific literacy, James Trefil has long been the public's guide to a better understanding of the world. In this provocative book, Trefil looks squarely at our environmental future and finds-contrary to popular wisdom-reason to celebrate. For too long, Trefil argues, humans have treated nature as something (...) separate from themselves-pristine wilderness to be saved or material resources to be exploited. What we need instead is a scientific approach to the environment that embraces the human transformation of nature for our benefit. In Human Nature , Trefil exposes the benefits of genetically modified species, uncovers vital facts about droughts and global warming, and points to examples of environmental management where catering to humans reaps greater rewards than sheltering other species. By taking advantage of explosive advances in the sciences, we can fruitfully manage the planet, if we rise to the challenge. Like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb, Human Nature promises to fundamentally alter the way we perceive our relationship to the Earth-but with optimism rather than alarm. (shrink)

In this unique work, James P. Sterba argues that traditional ethics has yet to confront the three significant challenges posed by environmentalism, feminism, and multiculturalism. He maintains that while traditional ethics has been quite successful at dealing with the problems it faces, it has not addressed the possibility that its solutions to these problems are biased in favor of humans, men, and Western culture. In Three Challenges to Ethics: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Multiculturalism, Sterba examines each of these challenges. In (...) the case of environmentalism, he argues that traditional ethics must incorporate conflict resolution principles that favor nonhumans over humans in a significant range of cases. In terms of feminism, he maintains that traditional ethics should rule out gendered family structures and implement an ideal of androgyny. In regard to multiculturalism, he contends that traditional ethics must endorse an ethics that is secular in character and that can survive an extensive comparative evaluation of both Western and non-Western moral ideals and cultures. The only textbook devoted to this topic, Three Challenges to Ethics is an engaging text for introductory courses in ethics and moral problems and is also interesting and provocative reading for scholars and general readers. (shrink)

How much understanding should be required of a person with respect to her actions and their implications for her to be autonomous with respect to her decisions to perform them? I defend a thin approach to the question of how much understanding of her acts a person should possess for her possibly to be autonomous with respect to her decisions to perform them: That a person could be autonomous with respect to her decision to perform a certain action if she (...) understood both the nature of the act and its expected implications under the intensional description under which she intentionally performed it. This paper is divided into three sections. First, I argue that a concern for the moral value of autonomy does not undergird the ethical requirement to secure a person’s informed consent to her medical treatment. Second, I respond to several objections that have been leveled against this argument that focus on its implicit premise that only a thin understanding of one’s actions is required for one to be autonomous with respect to one’s decisions to perform them. I conclude by indicating why this minimalist account of autonomy that I defend is preferable to its more robust competitors. (shrink)

We have now seen that, in what we call the mental world, Consciousness,- there are three grand classes of phenomena, the most familiar of all the facts with ...

From the older handbooks to the more recent scholarly literature, Gorgias's professions about his art are taken literally at their word: conjured up in all of these accounts is the image of a hearer irresistibly overwhelmed by Gorgias's apagogic and psychagogic persuasions. Gorgias's own description of his art, in effect, replaces our description of it. "His proofs... give the impression of ineluctability" . "Thus logos is almost an independent external power which forces the hearer to do its will" . "Incurably (...) deceptive," logos has an "enormous power" that acts upon opinion, which is "easy to change" . Surprisingly, the urge to describe or paraphrase Gorgias's art has caused commentators to overlook the very best witness of it that we have: its enactment, which is to say the performative value of Gorgias's writings, especially the speeches. For if Gorgias's literary remains do nothing else, they demonstrate how one can do things with words without being explicit about what is being done, even if this means contradicting, performatively, what is being said-as for instance in his statements, so unconvincingly made, about the ostensible aims of rhetoric. Was Gorgias persuasive in practice? Was persuasion even the goal? Is logos the solitary arbiter of reality that it is so often made out to be? Through close examination of Gorgias's Helen and parts of On Not-Being, I attempt to show that persuasion is manifestly not the goal of his arguments, which in the first instance are aporetic paradoxes that expose the difficulties of defining the nature of either language or reality, and which in the last instance are instruments of cultural demystification. The only deception at work in Gorgias's writings is that of the self-deception of their audience. It is this that gives these curiously revealing documents of fifth-century Greek culture their "dissuasive," not persuasive, character. (shrink)

This paper is about the similarity between the appreciation of a piece of art, such as a cherished music album, and the loving appreciation of a person whom one knows well. In philosophical discussion about the rationality of love, the Qualities View (QV) says that love can be justified by reference to the qualities of the beloved. I argue that the oft-rehearsed trading-up objection fails to undermine the QV. The problems typically identified by the objection arise from the idea that (...) love-worthy qualities could be coarse-grained, when in fact they must be fine-grained. The analogy with appreciation of aesthetic qualities helps to draw out this point. Once the fine-grained nature of love-worthy qualities is properly understood, it is clear that critics of the QV cannot rely on the trading-up objection to motivate its rejection. Moreover, the paper’s core argument helps to illuminate the persistently aesthetic nature of interpersonal affections. (shrink)

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order (...) to take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

In addition to being one of the world's most influential philosophers, Aristotle can also be credited with the creation of both the science of biology and the philosophy of biology. He was the first thinker to treat the investigations of the living world as a distinct inquiry with its own special concepts and principles. This book focuses on a seminal event in the history of biology - Aristotle's delineation of a special branch of theoretical knowledge devoted to the systematic investigation (...) of animals. Aristotle approached the creation of zoology with the tools of subtle and systematic philosophies of nature and of science that were then carefully tailored to the investigation of animals. The papers collected in this volume, written by a pre-eminent figure in the field of Aristotle's philosophy and biology, examine Aristotle's approach to biological inquiry and explanation, his concepts of matter, form and kind, and his teleology. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

I argue that wrong of plagiarism does not primarily stem from the plagiarist’s illicit misappropriation of academic credit from the person she plagiarized. Instead, plagiarism is wrongful to the degree to which it runs counter to the purpose of academic work. Given that this is to increase knowledge and further understanding plagiarism will be wrongful to the extent that it impedes the achievement of these ends. This account of the wrong of plagiarism has two surprising (and related) implications. First, it (...) follows from this account of the wrong of plagiarism that replication plagiarism might not be an academic wrong at all. (Replication plagiarism consists of the direct quotation or paraphrase of another’s work without attribution. The replication plagiarist thus plagiarizes primary sources, purloining for her own benefit the ideas of their authors). Second, even if replication plagiarism is still held to be an academic wrong, it will be a lesser wrong than bypass plagiarism. (Bypass plagiarism occurs when one quotes from, or provides a paraphrase of, a primary source, but although one cites the primary source one did not identify the quotation or provide the initial paraphrase oneself. Instead, one took the quotation, or drew upon an existing paraphrase, from a secondary source—and one did so without citing the secondary source to credit it as the source of one’s information about the primary source). Holding that bypass plagiarism is worse than replication plagiarizes reverses the usual assessment of the relative wrong of these two types of plagiarism. (shrink)

A lineage of prominent philosophers who have discussed the second-person relation can be regarded as advancing structural accounts. They posit that the second-person relation effects one transformative change to the structure of practical reasoning. In this paper, I criticise this orthodoxy and offer an alternative, substantive account. That is, I argue that entering into second-personal relations with others does indeed affect one's practical reasoning, but it does this not by altering the structure of one's agential thought, but by changing what (...) reasons can become available. The importance of second-personal thought for action is heterogenous. Second-person relations make possible the emergence of a wide variety of different kinds of practical reasons: creating some, revealing others. Recognising this diminishes the appeal of the traditional, structural accounts of the practical significance of such second-personal relations. Moving away from structural accounts facilitates a more thorough understanding of the intersubjective form of action. (shrink)

This article argues for a viable genealogical approach within critical theory that could settle the questions regarding normative viability of such critique. Then, the implications of the normative inheritance implied lead to the pairing of Jaeggi’s conceptualization and critique of forms of life with Rosa’s dual diagnosis of (late) modernity through the structural lenses of genealogy as tridimensional endeavor posed by Saar. In the end, the final argument is that a genealogical critique in these terms could be the next step (...) towards the revitalization of decolonial studies and a path for direct political action. (shrink)

Introduction -- A university lecture -- Violence and God's nature -- What Is Europe? -- Modernity and the three waves of dehellenization -- Revelation and culture -- Conclusion.