The debate around epistemic partiality in friendship presents us with several tough philosophical puzzles. One of these has been articulated in two objections to the view that friendship can require epistemic partiality on the grounds it is incompatible with the nature of friendship. The first, owed to Crawford, argues that you should not treat your friends with epistemic partiality because your beliefs about your friends should be responsive to the facts about them, and epistemic partiality is incompatible with this demand. (...) The second, owed to Mason, draws on a Murdochian account of love to argue that loving relationships—such as friendship—are ‘epistemically rich states’, which means that they are constituted by a drive towards ever greater and more intimate knowledge of our loved ones. In this paper, I shall argue that epistemic partiality may indeed limit what we know about our friends, but not in ways that diminish the quality of our love for them, and certainly not in ways that block us from being friends with them. (shrink)

Compassion unites people during times of suffering and distress. Unfortunately, compassion cannot take away suffering. Why then, is compassion important for people who suffer? Nurses work in a domain where human suffering is evidently present. In order to give meaning to compassion in the domain of professional care, it is necessary to describe what compassion is. The purpose of this paper is to explore questions and contradictions in the debate on compassion related to nursing care. The paper reviews classical philosophers (...) as well as contemporary scientists' main arguments on compassion. First, I will examine the relationship between compassion and suffering. Second, how does one recognize serious suffering? This issue raises questions about the role of imagination and the need for identification. Third, literature describes compassion as an emotion. Some philosophers consider emotions uncontrollable feelings; others see a clear rational dimension in emotions. In order to determine what compassion is, it is necessary to weigh these contradictional arguments. Fourth, I will discuss motives for compassion. Is compassion an act of altruism or egoism? In this debate Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are well‐known opponents. Today, analysis of their arguments leads to some surprising conclusions. Fifth, there is the issue of fault and compassion. Can we only feel compassionate when people who suffer are not to blame for their own suffering? Such a condition faces professional caretakers with a dilemma which needs a thorough analysis if compassion is to be of use in the field of professional care. Finally, I will explore the moral meaning of compassion. Compassion, described as a concept with cognitive as well as affective dimensions, also has volitional and behavioural aspects. These aspects specifically are of importance to nursing care and further research of compassion in the nursing domain. (shrink)

Many recent critical discussions of anthropocentrism have focused on Bryan Norton's 'convergence hypothesis': the claim that both anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric ethics will recommend the same environmentally responsible behaviours and policies. I argue that even if we grant the truth of Norton's convergence hypothesis, there are still good reasons to worry about anthropocentric ethics. Ethics legitimately raises questions about how to feel, not just about which actions to take or which policies to adopt. From the point of view of norms for (...) feeling, anthropocentrism has very different practical implications from nonanthropocentrism; it undermines some of the common attitudes - love, respect, awe - that people think it appropriate to take toward the natural world. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that parents have a fundamental moral obligation to consider and treat their children as each other’s equals. Yet the question of what grounds the equality of status among children in the eyes of their parents has so far been largely neglected in the literature on the philosophy of childhood and the ethics of parenthood. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of filial equality: it argues that parents ought to consider (...) and treat their children as equals by virtue of loving them. Parental love is the basis of filial equality. (shrink)

The essays in this collection examine the moral import of emotion, motivation, judgment, perception, and group identifications, and explore how all these psychic capacities contribute to a morally good life. They examine moral exemplars and the "moral saints" debate, the morality of rescue during the Holocaust, role morality as lying between "personal" and "impersonal" perspectives, Carol Gilligan's theory of women and morality, Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy, and moral responsiveness in young children.

According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might just well be a mere façon de parler. In this paper, we aim to advance the (...) discussion of Indian virtue ethics. Our intent is not to provide a catch-all interpretation of the different Indian schools. Our goal is, more modestly, to offer a theory of virtues in Indian philosophies, as a framework for theorists and interpreters who see these diverse traditions as amenable to systematic virtue analysis. Our theory grounds virtues in the reality of genuine moral dispositions and in a system of beliefs where morality is understood as transformative in nature. (shrink)

Virtue ethics is standardly taught and discussed as a distinctive approach to the major questions of ethics, a third major position alongside Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. I argue that this taxonomy is a confusion. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism contain treatments of virtue, so virtue ethics cannot possibly be a separate approach contrasted with those approaches. There are, to be sure, quite a few contemporary philosophical writers about virtue who are neither Utilitarians nor Kantians; many of these find inspiration in ancient (...) Greek theories of virtue. But even here there is little unity. Although certain concerns do unite this disparate group (a concern for the role of motives and passions in good choice, a concern for character, and a concern for the whole course of an agent''s life), there are equally profound disagreements, especially concerning the role that reason should play in ethics. One group of modern virtue-theorists, I argue, are primarily anti-Utilitarians, concerned with the plurality of value and the susceptibility of passions to social cultivation. These theorists want to enlarge the place of reason in ethics. They hold that reason can deliberate about ends as well as means, and that reason can modify the passions themselves. Another group of virtue theorists are primarily anti-Kantians. They believe that reason plays too dominant a role in most philosophical accounts of ethics, and that a larger place should be given to sentiments and passions -- which they typically construe in a less reason-based way than does the first group. The paper investigates these differences, concluding that it is not helpful to speak of virtue ethics, and that we would be better off characterizing the substantive views of each thinker -- and then figuring out what we ourselves want to say. (shrink)

Using both Confucian texts and the work of American pragmatist John Dewey, this book offers a distinctly Confucian model of democracy.

Wem wird geglaubt und wem nicht? Wessen Wissen wird weitergegeben und wessen nicht? Wer hat eine Stimme und wer nicht? Theorien der epistemischen Ungerechtigkeit befassen sich mit dem breiten Feld der ungerechten oder unfairen Behandlung, die mit Fragen des Wissens, Verstehens und Kommunizierens zusammenhängen, wie z.B. die Möglichkeit, vom Wissen oder von kommunikativen Praktiken ausgeschlossen zu werden oder zum Schweigen gebracht zu werden, aber auch Kontexte, in denen die Bedeutungen mancher systematisch verzerrt oder falsch gehört und falsch dargestellt werden, in (...) denen manchen misstraut wird oder es an epistemischer Handlungsfähigkeit mangelt. In diesem Buch wird eine Übersicht über die breite Debatte epistemischer Ungerechtigkeit, epistemischer Unterdrückung und epistemischer Gewalt gegeben, in dem unterschiedliche Theorien, die sich auf der Schnittstelle von Gerechtigkeitstheorie und epistemischen Fragen befinden, systematisch und kritisch diskutiert sowie theoretische Vorgänger dieser Theorien beleuchtet werden. (shrink)

Do epistemic and aesthetic values ever conflict? The answer might appear to be no, given that background knowledge generally enhances aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience in turn generates new knowledge. As Keats writes, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (Keats, 1996). Contra this line of thought, I argue that epistemic and aesthetic values can conflict when we over-rely on aesthetically enhancing background beliefs. The true and the beautiful can pull in different directions, forcing us to choose between flavours of normativity.

Perception provides us with access to the external world, but that access is shaped by our own experiential histories. Through perceptual learning, we can enhance our capacities for perceptual discrimination, categorization, and attention to salient properties. We can also encode harmful biases and stereotypes. This article reviews interdisciplinary research on perceptual learning, with an emphasis on the implications for our rational and normative theorizing. Perceptual learning raises the possibility that our inquiries into topics such as epistemic justification, aesthetic criticism, and (...) moral knowledge should include not only an examination of cognition but also of perception. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

It is widely held that moral reasons are universalizable. On this view, when I give a moral reason for my action, I take this reason to apply with equal normative force to anyone placed in a relevantly similar situation. Here, I offer an interpretation and defense of Iris Murdoch's critique of the universalizability thesis, distinguishing her position from the contemporary versions of particularism with which she has often been mistakenly associated. Murdoch's argument relies upon the idea that moral concepts may (...) take on idiosyncratic meanings that are unique to a particular individual. Consequently, an agent may conceptualize her situation in such a way that it would not make sense to imagine anyone else facing it. For such an agent, it would be meaningless to say that she took her reasons to apply to anyone other than herself. I defend Murdoch’s argument through an extended analysis of a literary example, and consider and reject four possible lines of objection. Finally, I consider the consequences of the argument for our understanding of the nature of moral reasoning and what Murdoch describes as the ‘endless task’ of love. (shrink)

Lovers often disagree. We may reject the specific goals our loved ones pursue or the broad values they hold. Some philosophers suggest that such evaluative conflict makes romantic love in its ideal form deficient. I argue that this is mistaken. On the contrary, our ideal of love holds that we can love people for ‘who they are’ (as we say), even as we profoundly disagree with them. My argument draws on intuitive cases from screwball comedy about love amid conflict, love (...) across political party lines, as well as ‘forbidden’ love across religions and cultures. At a deeper level, I sketch an ideal of love I call intimate independence and argue that this ideal is (i) fully compatible with any evaluative conflict, (ii) embedded in our ordinary attitudes towards mature love between equals, and (iii) an ideal worth achieving. As long as intimate independence is a compelling ideal, deep conflict will not seem like an obstacle to true love. The ideal reminds us that love can bring together people with radically different points of view, and that to insist on shared ends or values is thus to miss a part of the meaning and power of love. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is the role of subjectivity in the pursuit of the good. I propose that subjective thought as well as a subjective mental process underappreciated in philosophical psychology – contemplation – are instrumental for discovering and apprehending a whole range of value. In fact, I will argue that our primary contact with these values is through experience and that they could not be properly understood in any other way. This means that subjectivity is central to our (...) evaluative lives. (shrink)

Argues that we do not act intentionally ‘under the guise of the good.’ This makes it hard to explain why akrasia is distinctively irrational; but this is no objection, since it is just as hard to explain on the opposing view. Ends with a problem of akrasia for ethical rationalists.

An important yet often unacknowledged aspect of moral discourse is the phenomenon of moral impossibility, which challenges more widely accepted models of moral discussion and deliberation as a choice among possible options. Starting from observations of the new possibilities of anti immigrant attitudes and hate crimes which have been described by the press as something being “unleashed,” the paper asks what it means for something to enter or not the sphere of possibility in the moral sense, and whether it is (...) ever desirable for something to remain or be pushed back outside the realm of the morally possible. Three forms of moral impossibility are identified: the unconceived, the unthinkable, and moral incapacity. Through the discussion of a stark fictional example of moral impossibility, the paper concludes that while the category of moral impossibility cannot settle disagreement, it sheds light on some of the most fundamental aspects of moral life. (shrink)

I argue that emotional sensitivity (or insensitivity) has a marked negative influence on ethical perception. Diminished capacities of ethical perception, in turn, mitigate what we are morally responsible for while lack of such capacities may altogether eradicate responsibility. Impairment in ethical perception affects responsibility by affecting either recognition of or reactivity to moral reasons. It follows that emotional insensitivity (together with its attendant impairment in ethical perception) bears saliently on moral responsibility. Since one distinguishing mark of the psychopath is emotional (...) insensitivity, emotional insensitivity and the resulting impairment in moral perception either excuses the psychopath from moral culpability or moderates the degree to which he is culpable. (shrink)

We are frequently confronted with moral situations that are unsettling, confusing, disorienting. We try to come to grips with them. When we do so, we engage in a distinctive type of moral inquiry: hermeneutical inquiry. Its aim is to make sense of our situation. What is it to make sense of one's situation? Hermeneutical inquiry is part of our everyday moral experience. Understanding its nature and its place in moral epistemology is important. Yet, I argue, that existing accounts of moral (...) inquiry do not give us the resources to do so. This paper develops a positive account of hermeneutical inquiry. I argue that when we engage in hermeneutical inquiry, we search for an apt perspective on our situation. (shrink)

Reflection on free agency has largely been motivated by perceived threats to its very existence, which, in turn, has driven the philosophical conversation to focus on the question of whether we have the freedom required for moral responsibility. The Stoics were early participants in this conversation, but they were also concerned about an ideal of inner moral freedom, a freedom over and above that required for responsibility, and one to which we might aspire over the course of our lives. Though (...) some details of the Stoic ideal would be difficult for many of us to accept, I argue that it merits our attention for the way it focuses on the removal of inner obstacles to virtue, leading to improved moral vision and the willingness to follow that vision. I then show how we can harness resources from contemporary theorizing on responsible agency to capture the structure and scalar nature of such an ideal, thereby helpfully situating ideal moral freedom in relation to the freedom relevant to moral responsibility. I outline three possible contemporary versions of such an ideal, noting how each will be sensitive to related commitments in metaphysics, moral psychology, and normative theory. (shrink)

Practical reasoning is reasoning about what to do. Practical wisdom is the traditional ideal of practical reasoning associated with virtue ethics. Practical wisdom requires the knowledge and skills necessary to act rightly across a wide range of situations. Critics allege that this notion does not cohere well with what contemporary cognitive science tells us about the production of human behavior. After briefly discussing these criticisms, I sketch an alternative account of these cognitive processes that I call affective engine theory. I (...) then discuss a normative conception of practical reasoning that complements this account. Finally, adopting an approach according to which the virtues are those character traits necessary for excellence in practical reasoning, I argue that these accounts can provide the basis for a nontraditional theory of virtue. I discuss three traits that are plausible candidates for virtues on such an account. (shrink)

Three ethical conflicts in particular are paradigmatic of what we define as “clerkship ethics.” First, a distinction that differentiates the clerkship student from the practicing physician involves the student’s principal role as a learner. The clerkship student must skillfully balance her commitment to her own education against her commitment to patient care in a fashion that may compromise patient care. While the practicing physician can often resolve the tension between these two goods when they come into conflict, the clerkship student (...) is left with a more ambiguous set of choices. Second, evaluative scrutiny during clinical clerkships often forces medical students to balance doing what is morally fitting against the perceived expectations of the medical teams in which they work. Third and finally, a deeply entrenched culture of medical hierarchy presents a particular challenge to innovation and improvement in ethics education during the clerkship years. Students regard faculty as exemplars, but are not provided with the tools to assess when technical medical competence is not matched by moral competence; moreover, these faculty are unlikely to have experienced the ethics education in which students are asked to demonstrate mastery. (shrink)

This paper addresses the impact of genetic advances and understandings on our concept of the self and the individual. In particular it focuses on conceptions of the ‘autonomous individual’ in the post-Enlightenment tradition and in bioethics. It considers the ascendancy of the autonomous individual as the model of the self and describes the erosion of substantial concepts of the self and the reduction of the self to “the will”—with the accompanying values of freedom, choice and autonomy. This conception of the (...) self as an isolated, autonomous individual, characterised by acts of ‘will’ is then critiqued drawing on both theoretical sources, particularly the work of Iris Murdoch, and practical sources, namely the difficulties raised by genetics. (shrink)

In this article, I examine a distinctive position in moral philosophy that, following Bernard Williams, I label “postanalytic”. In one of his final essays, “What Might Philosophy Become?”, Williams sets out a program for extending moral philosophy beyond its traditional “limits” in a way that will transform it into an embodied, historical, and political form of reflective practice.1 This programmatic intent has been shared by a number of moral philosophers since, some of whom are expressly influenced by Williams’s late work. (...) In what follows, I limit myself to a discussion of just two: Raimond Gaita and Christopher Hamilton, contemporary moral philosophers who are wedded to the... (shrink)

Moral perceptualism is the theory that perception and perceptual experience is attuned to moral features in our environment. This idea has received renewed attention in the last 15–20 years, for its potential to do theoretical work in moral epistemology and moral psychology. In this paper, I review the main motivations and arguments for moral perceptualism, the variety of theories that go under the heading of “moral perception,” and the three biggest challenges to moral perception. https://youtu.be/9cc_1zykq80.

What is Christian about Christian bioethics? The short answer to this question is that the Incarnation should shape the form and content of Christian bioethics. In explicating this answer it is argued that contemporary medicine is unwittingly embracing and implementing the transhumanist dream of transforming humans into posthumans. Contemporary medicine does not admit that there are any limits in principle to the extent to which it should intervene to improve the quality of human life. This largely inarticulate, yet ambitious, agenda (...) is derived first in late modernity's failed, but nonetheless ongoing, attempt to transform necessity into goodness, and second the loss of any viable concept of eternity, thereby stripping temporal existence of any normative significance. In short, medicine has become the vanguard of a profane attempt to save humankind by extracting data from flesh. In response, it is contended that an alternative Christian bioethics must be shaped by the Incarnation, the Word made flesh. This assertion does not entitle Christians to oppose the posthuman trajectory of contemporary medicine on the basis of any natural or biological essentialism. Rather, it is an evangelical witness to the grace of Christ's redemption instead of the work of self-transformation. It is Christ alone who thereby makes the vulnerability and mortality of finitude a gift and blessing. Specifically, it is maintained that the chasm separating necessity and goodness cannot be filled but only bridged through the suffering entailed in Christ's cross, and through Christ's resurrection eternity becomes the standard against which the temporal lives of human creatures are properly formed and measured. Consequently, Christian bioethics should help us become conformed to Christ rather than enabling selftransformation. (shrink)

The approach to mental health and well‐being taken here illustrates the complementary perspectives approach and assumes that there are useful and intersecting contributions from science (including medicine) and from religion and spirituality. What counts as poor mental well‐being depends on the interaction of relatively objective criteria with culturally contingent value judgments. I then discuss theological perspectives on depression, including a consideration of sources of hope and tolerance of dysphoria, and argue that depression can be part of a spiritual journey. I (...) then look at the relationship between psychosis and religion, including the work of Isabel Clarke, arguing that a spiritual approach to psychosis can complement a medical approach. Finally, I present a pastoral case study illustrating the interface between neurological and spiritual aspects of the sense of presence. A religious perspective can challenge and complement current assumptions about mental health in a potentially fruitful way. (shrink)

It is argued that there are good scientific grounds for accepting that cognition functions in a way that reflects embodiment. This represents a more holistic, systemic way of thinking about human beings, and contributes to the coordination of scientific assumptions about mind and body with those of the faith traditions, moving us beyond sterile debates about reductionism. It has been claimed by Francisco Varela and others that there is an affinity between Buddhism and embodied cognition, though it is argued here (...) that they are less closely aligned than is sometimes assumed. Embodied cognition also accords well with the holistic strand of thinking about human nature in Judeo-Christian thinking. While accepting the persuasiveness of the general case for cognition being embodied it is suggested here that some forms of cognition are more embodied than others, and that it may be one of the distinctive features of humans that they have developed a capacity for relatively nonembodied forms of cognition. (shrink)

Work on representing women's voices in ethics has produced a vision of moral understanding profoundly subversive of the traditional philosophical conception of moral knowledge. 1 explicate this alternative moral “epistemology,” identify how it challenges the prevailing view, and indicate some of its resources for a liberatory feminist critique of philosophical ethics.

This article presents a long overdue analysis of the idea of an ethically committed social science, which, after the demise of positivism and the deeming of moral neutrality as impossible, has come to dominate the self-understanding of many contemporary sociological approaches. Once adequately specified, however, the idea is shown to be ethically questionable in that it works against the moral commitments constitutive of academic life. The argument is conducted with resources from the work of Peter Winch, thus establishing its continuing (...) relevance and critical importance for the social sciences, sociology in particular. Special reference is made to heretofore unappreciated aspects of Winch’s work, including within the groundbreaking The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, but focusing specifically on his later contributions to ethics. (shrink)

Julia Ward Howe, author of the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” remains known as a poet, abolitionist, and founding member of the antiracist organization American Woman Suffrage Association, but her work on political philosophy and her foundational sense of the necessity for justice and suffrage for all without exception are still unexplored. Howe's speech, “The Position of Women in Plato's Republic” provides a window into the philosophy that shaped the second half of her life and her political (...) organizing. Howe explores problems feminist scholars have often had with Socrates's plans to educate and enfranchise women of the ruling class, analyzes the rhetoric behind Socrates's successful persuasion of reluctant interlocutors, and transforms Plato's arguments into overwhelming rhetorical support for universal suffrage. Howe's intellectual conversion to the cause of suffrage, which occurred later in life and after her support for the 15th Amendment, comes into focus as she wrestles with the questions fundamental to her change of heart: women's moral relationship to human excellence, whether suffrage would destabilize family life, the relationship of gender to divine genderless unity, and the relationship of the Platonic principle of the Good to practical political policy. (shrink)

One of the urgent tasks facing Christian educators at the present time is how they might encourage the spiritual growth of their students. This paper invites reflection on this central question by discussing the role aesthetics might play with particular focus on its relationship to the ‘spiritual senses’, a theme which has been strikingly absent from recent publications on religion and Christian education. Paying particular attention to the work of the contemporary French phenomenologist, Jean-Louis Chrétien, I shall argue that art (...) invites us to listen to as well as to see the power of beauty. Educators should not ignore this capacity of art to engage the spiritual senses within a contemplative ethos of silence. But I go further than simply pointing to these seminal ideas about Christian formation, by discussing the ‘wound’ that beauty inevitably inflicts. I illustrate this suggestion by referring to Pope Benedict XVI's essay ‘Wounded by the Arrow of the Beautiful’ and to two visualizations of religion: Delacroix's painting Fight between Jacob and the Angel and Beauvois' film Of Gods and Men. (shrink)

Catharine Macaulay, an 18th century English historian, published her educational philosophy in Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects in 1790. The ultimate goal of her educational process, to ‘bring the human mind to such a height of perfection as shall induce the practice of the best morals’, (, p. 173) is examined in this paper. Her ideas about the interactions among benevolence, sympathy, reason and the public voice with regard to the education of the moral, virtuous (...) person are considered. Macaulay's suggestions regarding the benefits of a specific curriculum and pedagogy in developing students capable of filtering the limiting dictates of society and aspiring toward virtue are analyzed. Particular attention is paid to the tensions her suggestions embody for the ideal, co‐educational classroom. (shrink)

Bernard Williams questioned whether impartial morality “can allow for the importance of individual character and personal relations in moral experience.” Underlying his position is a distinction between factual and practical deliberation. While factual deliberation is about the world and brings in a standpoint that is impartial, practical deliberation is, he claims, radically first‐personal; it “involves an I that [is] intimately the I of my desires.” While it may be thought that Williams's claim implies an unpalatable Humean subjectivism, the present article (...) argues that this does not follow: That first‐person practical deliberation is directed both by the “I of my desires” and by the world. Drawing on Peter Winch's argument against the universalizability of moral judgments and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the article argues that practical deliberations involve discovering value in the world, but that what is revealed about the world depends constitutively on the first‐person deliberations and decisions of particular agents. (shrink)

Advances in neonatology have led to improved survival for periviable infants. Immaturity still carries a high risk of short- and long-term harms, and uncertainty turns provision of life support int...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Definition:A French InitiativeNancy S. StrueverRhetoric as TheoryIl y a quelque chose de démesuré et de prématuré à entreprendre une histoire de la rhétorique dans I'Europe moderne(Fumaroli 1999).When in his preface to the Histoire de la rhétorique Marc Fumaroli states that the project itself is overambitious and premature, he proceeds to justify his judgment by listing the complications of rhetorical definition: rhetoric is Protean in nature, and in this (...) it simply matches the fluidity of the phenomena of speech, parole ; it is oxymoronic as the science of the uncertain, trying to ally incertitude of topic with intelligibility of explanation; it intricates theoria and ergon, the concept of parole with an engagement with parole in act. Long a part of early education, it generates grace in adult expression, finesse. It is as well a primary source for reflection on communication phenomena. It is manifest in works of genius, yet, it is democratic in its accessibility; it is perdurable, remarkably persistent through change; and, it recognizes that the sharing and abusing of parole are intimately bound together. Finally rhetoric stimulates, for it may illumine the contemporary "exile" of literature and the arts, an exile that poses for us the issue of, perhaps intractable, cultural decline (Fumaroli 1999, 2–3). [End Page 401]These disparate elements of rhetoric, I would argue, by their very complexity justify rhetoric as mode of inquiry, and prompt our continuing consideration of the investigative protocols of rhetoric as hermeneutic. Roman rhetoric, subdivided into three communicative tasks—docere, delectare, movere —sponsors three investigative tasks: instructing requires command of the strategies of argument; delighting sponsors an ecology of desire, and moving requires a socio-pathology of community assent and dissent. The rhetorical interest in discursive effect, then, sponsors a second-order inquiry, the task of reviewing the basic assumptions of the communicative community: the beliefs, doxa, the shared opinions, endoxa, habits, dispositions. Rhetoric collects assumptions; thus Aristotle's Rhetoric has been characterised as a compendium of the collective wisdom of the polis. Rhetorical topoi, commonplaces, are the rubrics that organize common sense, sensus communis. Rhetoric has the task of understanding the means of asserting, rejecting, altering beliefs, the transfer of theory into practice, dealing with the transformations of idea into ideology.Rhetorical interests, in the Habermasian sense of motives that color knowledge initiatives, can correct careers of inquiry; a shift to a rhetorical investigative focus is pragmatic, to a most distinctive engagement with practice. And thus Martin Heidegger's aphorism: "Rhetoric functions inside politics." Rhetoric is framed, compromised by politics defined in the generous sense of discursive negotiations within the communal domain of beliefs, shared opinions, habits of action, dispositions. Rhetorical inquiry has to identify the beliefs and habits of action of a community in its efforts to preserve and extend its identity, and rhetoric must analyze the discursive negotiations for affirmation and alteration of beliefs vital to the continued existence of the polity.The work of Marc Fumaroli is of intrinsic interest to the historian of rhetoric as an instantiation of rhetorical interests driving an entire career, a practice shaped by rhetorical tasks and habits of action in inquiry; the effect is that of a kind of alchemy, of the transformation, at every turn, of the history of culture into the history of cultural politics. "Cultural politics" does not denote, of course, an exclusive focus on state policy, dirigisme in culture. Rather, we have a combination of a compendious notion of culture as all our inventions, artifices—political, theological, affective, aesthetic—with a generous sense of politics as all our discursive negotiations of differences of public import, a combination that sets a topic that Fumaroli prefers to call a "politics of the spirit" (Fumaroli 1992a, 80–81).1 If we distinguish rhetoric as discipline, oratory as product, eloquence as value, we [End Page 402] see Fumaroli's career is exemplary of a modern initiative that links rhetoric as disciplined inquiry to the politics of value. Thus, he will give us a rhetorical definition of the Académie Française's communal, historical duty to French "eloquence," to a pursuit of a national excellence (Fumaroli 1996a, 304, 1992b, 78). And... (shrink)

I guess I wont send that note now, for the mind is such a new place, last night feels obsolete.

I guess I wont send that note now, for the mind is such a new place, last night feels obsolete.

The connection between ethics and theological vision has become increasingly important for ethics as we better appreciate how the moral agent is embedded in a framework that affectively and intellectually shapes her moral reasoning. Moral reasoning is always reasoning within (that is, within a moral framework, a religious worldview, and/or a set of ideological commitments). A similar framing occurs in literature, which I refer to as its “horizon.” A literary text's horizon comprises the theological and metaphysical commitments that are implied (...) by the text and that the reader relies on to make sense of it. I suggest that there is a parallel between how moral frameworks and literary horizons operate in that both shape moral judgment. I argue that in using literature as a resource for ethics, the same contemporary currents that have led us to appreciate the embeddedness of moral reasoning should also encourage us to give more careful attention to the theological or metaphysical vision implied by a text. Such a “theo-ethical” reading of literature provides a richer understanding of particular moral goods and the interplay between those goods and ethical themes like agency, hope, and redemption. I substantiate this claim with a reading of William Blake's Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion. (shrink)

In this article, I consider how pride and anxiety can prevent us from loving the neighbour, and how Søren Kierkegaard and K.E. Løgstrup offer two different ways in which these obstacles might be overcome. For Kierkegaard, this is made possible if we stand in the right relation to God, while for Løgstrup it is made possible if we understand life as a gift. The differences and respective merits of both approaches are explored, and in particular whether Løgstrup's approach can claim (...) to offer a secular alternative to the role that Kierkegaard gives to God's grace in making neighbour love possible. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. In liberal political philosophy, from Michel de Montaigne to Judith Shklar, cruelty – the wilful inflicting of pain on another in order to cause anguish and fear – has been singled out as ‘the most evil of all evils’ and as unjustifiable: the ultimate vice. An unconditional rejection and negation of cruelty is taken to be programmatic within a liberal paradigm. In this contribution, two anthropologists triangulate cruelty as a concept with torture and (...) with love. Treating the capability to practise cruelty and the liability to suffer from cruelty as universal aspects of a human condition, Stade and Rapport aim to instantiate the precise enactment of cruelty, firstly, and secondly, to propose a process of its social negation. CIA training manuals and quotidian practice within the British National Health Service are employed as illustrative materials. (shrink)

There is an unresolved stand-off between ontological naturalism and phenomenological thought regarding the question whether normativity can be reduced to physical entities. While the ontological naturalist line of thought is well established in analytic philosophy, the phenomenological reasoning for the irreducibility of normativity has been largely left ignored by proponents of naturalism. Drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Schütz, Stein and others, I reconstruct a phenomenological argument according to which natural science (as the foundation of naturalization projects) is itself (...) a part of the essentially normative life-world to the effect that ontological naturalism faces a bootstrapping problem. I aim to demonstrate that this stand-off is grounded in a deep disagreement about the possibility of reduction. I close by arguing that this deep disagreement turns on the question which conception about the nature of (natural) science is true. This result pits a perfectionist model of science (implied by ontological naturalism) against a pragmatist conception of science (in favour of the phenomenological argument). The motivation is that transforming the disagreement about the controversial principle into a disagreement about conceptions of science may help to offer a foundation for different attempts at solving the stand-off. (shrink)

In both ethics and epistemology an important question is whether justification is a fully internal or a partly external matter. In view of analogies between relevant considerations in each area, I recommend distinguishing, as basic and independent subjects of normative status, (i) people and (ii) what they do. Evaluations of subjects, on one hand, and of their beliefs and actions, on the other, are less intimately related than is presupposed. This helps resolve internalism/externalism controversies in both domains. An important related (...) advantage of the distinction is its effect on our understanding of normative luck, both moral and epistemic. (shrink)