CAMILO, Bruno. Aspectos metafísicos na física de Newton: Deus. In: DUTRA, Luiz Henrique de Araújo; LUZ, Alexandre Meyer (org.). Temas de filosofia do conhecimento. Florianópolis: NEL/UFSC, 2011. p. 186-201. (Coleção rumos da epistemologia; 11). Através da análise do pensamento de Isaac Newton (1642-1727) encontramos os postulados metafísicos que fundamentam a sua mecânica natural. Ao deduzir causa de efeito, ele acreditava chegar a uma causa primeira de todas as coisas. A essa primeira causa de tudo, onde toda a ordem e leis (...) tiveram início, a qual para ele assume um caráter divino, Newton aponta para um Deus sábio e poderoso e responsável pela ordem inteligente e pela a harmonia das leis físicas e universais de tudo o que existe – Deus como criador e preservador da ordem do universo. Há ainda a analogia do conceito de Deus com o espaço e o tempo, na medida em que ambos comunicam infinitude e onipresença. Por fim, nas considerações finais apontarei a importância de Newton para a metafísica moderna e como os seus estudos contribuíram para uma visão posterior do universo e suas leis e do homem enquanto ser pensante. (shrink)

It is often claimed that liberalism is falsely and perniciously universalist. I take this charge seriously, exploring three positions: the communitarians’, Rorty’s, and that of “comprehensive” liberalism. After explaining why universalism is thought impossible, I examine the communitarian view that value is determined within communities and argue that it results in a form of relativism that is unacceptable. I next discuss Richard Rorty’s liberal acceptance of “conventionalism” and explain how, despite his rejection of universalism, Rorty remains a liberal. I then (...) present a defense of universalism, based in part on arguments that parallel Thomas Nagel’s arguments in defense of a “view from nowhere” and Jean Hampton’s objectivist arguments against Rawls’s moves to a “merely political” theory. That defense requires that we can distance ourselves from our ends to make moral judgments shorn of all partialities. (shrink)

El presente artículo analiza el planteamiento que algunos autores comunitaristas han hecho de la noción de autonomía personal. En primer lugar centraré la atención en la formulación kantiana de la autonomía y en las posteriores reformulaciones que se han hecho de la propuesta original. En la segunda parte expondré algunos aspectos generales de la teoría comunitarista para luego desarrollar la propuesta de Charles Taylor, específicamente la ética de la autenticidad. En el análisis se destacan los problemas que surgen de entender (...) la autonomía desde la perspectiva de una ética comprehensiva que concibe al sujeto como continuador de una tradición moral colectiva. (shrink)

Abstract Juxtaposing Pierre Trudeau and Charles Taylor allows for assessing not simply an epoch in Canadian political life but more fundamentally two contrasting visions of modern government and society. The key is not in the usual contrasts: liberalism versus communitarianism or individual rights versus collective rights; but in the opposition between Trudeau?s centralized and Taylor?s decentralized vision of federalism. What emerges from analyzing that familiar difference is significant and ironic. While Taylor?s view seems more cognizant of government?s formative activity and (...) of culture in politics, it is Trudeau?s view that better upholds: (1) the role of government as both an instrument of common purposes and a protector of individual rights; (2) the significance of culture as both a carrier of democratic values and an array of distinctive ways of life. (shrink)

This paper sees Charles Taylor's moral discourse as a version of liberal communitarianism, an attempt to reconcile liberalism and communitarianism, by examining his three transcendental arguments: the liberal transcendence from the parochial to the universal; the communi tarian transcendence from the instinctual to the ontological; and the theistic transcendence from the good to God. While this liberal communi tarianism absorbs some great insights from both liberalism and communi tarianism and overcomes some of their respective weaknesses, it fails to avoid their (...) common dichotomy of the good and the right because Taylor's fundamentally communitarian commitment leads him to believe that there must be a universal ontological (religious or metaphysical) idea of the good as the foundation for any needed universal social and political idea of the right. (shrink)

This article examines the 2008 report of the Quebec Government’s Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences which was co-authored by Charles Taylor. Summarizing its main themes, it identifies points of intersection with Taylor’s political thought. Issues of citizen equality, including gender equality, secularism, integration and interculturalism, receive special attention.

Contextualist moral philosophers criticise hands-off liberal theories of justice for abstracting from the cultural context in which people make choices. Will Kymlicka and Joseph Carens, for example, demonstrate that these theories are disadvantageous to cultural minorities who want to pursue their own way of life. I argue that Pierre Bourdieu's critique of moral reason radicalises contextualist moral philosophy by giving it a sociological turn. In Bourdieu's view it is not enough to provide marginalised groups or subgroups with equal access to (...) public institutions and specific cultural rights—in some cases this may in fact be detrimental. He contends that scientists, politicians and other intellectuals have a duty to take seriously the social presuppositions of free deliberate choice and public opinion and to support cultural minorities with instruments to liberate themselves from their often precarious situation. (shrink)

This paper contrasts three non-skeptical ways of explaining and reconciling political struggles: monologue, instrumental dialogue, and a comparative dialogical approach promoted by Charles Taylor and James Tully. It surveys the work of Taylor and Tully to show three particular family resemblances: their emphasis on practice, irreducible diversity, and periodic reconciliation. These resemblances are evident in the way they employ dialogical approaches to explain struggles over recognition and distribution. They describe these as dialogical actions, and suggest that a form of dialogical (...) comparison might reconcile their various contested demands. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the possible contributions of empirical moral philosophy to professional ethics in teacher education. We argue that it is both possible and desirable to connect knowledge of how teachers empirically do and understand professional ethics with normative theories of teachers’ professional ethics. Our argument is made in dialogue with the moral philosophy of Charles Taylor and the emerging tradition of ‘empirical ethics’ in psychiatry. We also draw on empirical data from a larger empirical project on teachers’ (...) professional ethics in Norway. Our main contribution is the development of a method for empirical professional ethics that involves three steps: articulation, disturbance and expansion. (shrink)

This paper aims to come to grips with the rich philosophy of Charles Taylor by focusing on his concept of ‘strong evaluation’. I argue that a close examination of this term brings out more clearly the continuing tensions in his writings as a whole. I trace back the origin of strong evaluation in Taylor’s earliest writings, and continue by laying out the different philosophical themes that revolve around it. Next, the focus is on the separate arguments in which strong evaluation (...) is central, uncovering several methodological conflicts in Taylor’s strategies. Arguing against most of his commentators, I suggest that a distinction should be drawn between the philosophical anthropological, moral, and ontological implications of strong evaluation. As a result, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it clarifies the issue of strong evaluation by distinguishing the different arguments in which Taylor employs the concept. Second, it makes the case for multiple tensions within Taylor’s methods. Third, as a consequence, this analysis not only enables us to evaluate the potential and limits of his subject-centered philosophy but also separates his objectivist claims from his theories of human subjectivity, opening up the question of the metaphysical status of his ontological view. (shrink)

In the last years of his life, Michel Foucault sought to address ?ethical? questions, having to do with the self's relation to itself, by trying to locate in the Roman Stoics and other philosophers of antiquity what he called ?an aesthetics of existence.? By this Foucault meant ?the idea of a self which has to be created as a work of art.? This article aims at a critical dialogue with the texts that compose this last phase of Foucault's thought, probing (...) the moral and political adequacy of Foucault's Nietzschean vision of the self's aesthetic self?creation. (shrink)

According to one model of social theory, the social theorist seeks to give as rich an account as possible of a society's own self?understanding or self?interpretation. The second model, by contrast, involves challenging the society's self?understanding on the basis of a radical vision of ultimate standards of. judgment. Charles Taylor claims that neither of these models should be privileged over the other, that both are equiprimordial ways of theorizing social life. However, Taylor does privilege the first model in his own (...) practice of social theory?which can be summed up in the phrase, ?the rhetoric of understanding.? (shrink)

Although Ricoeur and Taylor are often grouped together, their conceptions of language, literature, and practical reason are very different. The first half of this essay focuses on Ricoeur's theory of triple mimesis and narrative, showing how his attempt to synthesize Kant, Husserl, and structuralism results in a formalism that blocks out the ontological, hermeneutical, and historical dimensions of literature and practical reason. The second half of the essay develops Taylor's ontological conception of public imagination and illustrates the dynamics of this (...) conception of language and interpretation by showing how literary works debate with each other over language, subjectivity, and reference. Narrative does not just order; it argues. (shrink)

This paper examines the increasing trend by nursing scholars such as Patricia Benner to conceptualize ethics as a contextual and embodied ‘way of knowing’, embedded in nursing expertise. The intellectual origins of this development and its debt to neo‐Aristotelian thinkers such as philosopher Charles Taylor are discussed. It will be argued that rather than revealing a truth about ethical expertise, the emergence of the ‘expert’ nurse as a moral and ethical category is the result of the elaboration of neo‐Thomist discourses (...) in the educational and professional shaping of nurses. These discourses act on and are enacted by the individual nurse through his or her participation in specific ethical exercises that result in the constitution of the desired subjectivity – or ‘expertise’. Central to this shaping are particular notions of ‘the good’ and its relationship to knowledge, skill and practice. Critiques of these neo‐Aristotelian perspectives are discussed and applied to the notion of moral expertise in nursing, and the claims made by its proponents concerning the ‘ethical’ distinction between experienced and expert nurses. Finally, a call is made for a more pluralistic approach to ethics. (shrink)

Postpositivists have lately joined post‐Husserlians in arguing that the deepest problem with Descartes' legacy is that it fosters the objectivist illusion that philosophers might actually come to think “from Nowhere,” or at least that they can self‐consciously choose whatever presuppositions they do accept. Yet this argument is easier to express than to incorporate into one's own thinking. It is perfectly possible to oppose the View from Nowhere, and even to criticize others for failing to understand its impossibility, and still do (...) so … as if from Nowhere. This article is concerned with such compromised opposition—that is, with critics who reject, in ahistorical terms and from an ahistorical standpoint, an ahistorical conception of philosophy. It focuses on two figures from the empiricist‐positivist side of the Cartesian legacy, Rorty and Taylor, but their story is in important ways typical. Though their criticisms are certainly more radical and considerably more successful than those of many of their analytic colleagues, each retains in his own thinking more of the ahistorical or standpointless ideal than he realizes. (shrink)