Within his earliest contributions to the human sciences, Charles Taylor challenged dominant behavioral views by advancing a hermeneutical conception of human agency. For Taylor, persons continually...

After the demise of Christianity, Western society did not become secular, according to Emile Durkheim, but located foundations in a new religion he calls the “cult of the individual.” This religion holds the rational individual person as sacred, and corresponds to a multi-faceted, complex, and diverse society united around individual democratic rights and modern science. Different traditional religions can co-exist in the cult of the individual, but only if they accept a subordinate status in relation to it. Durkheim maintains, however, (...) that all religions construct authoritative regimes of truth and moral obligations, setting the stage for conflict. How then should modern democracies respond to challenges to their authority from traditional religions? This article argues that a Durkheimian response would be to assert the values of the cult of the individual, as this is the only way to maintain the integrity and viability of Western democratic society. (shrink)

The beatific vision plays a prominent role in the history of Christian ethics. Reformed ethics has an ambiguous relationship to this history, on two counts. First, it offers some qualified critiques of the role of vision in ordering ethical understanding, and second, on some accounts, Reformed ethics shares some responsibility for the loss of transcendence in the modern world, and the narrowing of the ethical field that has resulted from this loss. This essay argues that the vision of God in (...) John Calvin’s understanding of the Christian life offers resources to defend a Reformed ethics from some recent detractors. Further, it provides a constructive contrast with the role of eschatology in a prominent strand of 20th century ethics. This argument is sustained through a close reading of Calvin’s biblical commentaries on the role of theophanies and the promise of the vision of God, and of Book III, chapters 6-10 of the Institutes. (shrink)

The paper is meant to be a contribution to the study of Indian and comparative ethics. It treats the Vajjālaggam, an anthology of Prākrit stanzas (subhāsita literature) dealing with a variety of topics. Focusing on the ‘ethical’ sections of the VL, it tries to describe and analyse its underlying ethical system. In Part I the different ethical themes of the VL (Valour and Destiny, Virtues and Vices, Masters and Servants, Friendship and Affection, Poverty and Charity) are described in detail. In (...) Part II it is shown that the VL. offers a clear example of a virtue ethic with a strong emphasis on self‐regarding virtues (gunas), based on a pluralistic and instrumental theory of the good. The paper also treats the crucial ethical problem of the relationship between personal well‐being and virtuousness as described in the VL. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the influence of an organisation's structure, such as that of the National Education System, in the emergence of desirable social properties. In this case the concern is schools with adequate performance. It is assumed that there is a circular causality between structure and the social results of schools. I highlight some of the structural requirements to have justice, sense of belonging, trust, honesty and cooperation as emerging properties of these schools, beyond normative statements. These are (...) requirements for effective citizenship. In order to study this, it is necessary to observe the structures that constitute collectives into organisations. Central to this paper is a case study that I carried out at Millfield Primary School in the U.K., which focused on the observation of citizenship as a dynamic process permanently being constructed. This case went beyond the normative understanding of citizenship as established in the new school curriculum to be implemented from September 2002. I take the view that the aim of citizenship is to build up a community in which one is constituted as a citizen. For that purpose we need enabling people to build up their own communities. My conclusion from this case study suggests that current educational methodologies aim at teaching a "model of" citizenship rather than at providing the necessary tools to think about and create suitable spaces "for" citizenship. The case study shows that it is necessary to reinforce in schools practical methods to create membership and respect for others. (shrink)

Engaging in self-narrative is often touted as a powerful antidote to the bad effects of illness. However, there are various examples of what may broadly be termed “aversion” to illness narrative. I group these into three kinds: aversion to certain types of illness narrative; aversion to illness narrative as a whole; and aversion to illness narrative as an essentially therapeutic endeavor. These aversions can throw into doubt the advantages claimed for the illness narrator, including the key benefits of repair to (...) the damage illness does to identity and life-trajectory. Underlying these alleged benefits are two key presuppositions: that it is the whole of one’s life that is narratively unified, and that one’s identity is inextricably bound up with narrative. By letting go of these assumptions, illness narrative advocates can respond to the challenges of narrative aversions. (shrink)

This article questions the reading of Vivekananda. By drawing several fine lines of separations between a text and an utterance, we argue that Vivekananda spoke. Such separations have been drawn on three major aspects of locating a text as consciousness, as intention or as transmitted. Indeed, Vivekananda spoke as performance, and as knowledge has intimate relation with performance, this article draws major conclusions relating to science as from speaking. Much of science could be otherwise considered as myth and apprehending Vivekananda (...) as speaker would demythify knowledge and science. Vivekananda as we understood situated a dialogue in and about knowledge and about its epistemic. Such an analysis did not require an ‘other’ to be there. This suggests that India embraced knowledge as its weapon. Vivekananda rejected the putatively ‘spiritual’. Science and technology, insofar as this was mythic, did not appear to him attractive beyond what was called for by the necessity of pragmatism. Vivekananda talked about a state and about nationalism as a stepping stone only. He spoke on personal knowledge and freedom from ignorance and from poverty. (shrink)

Rorty claims argument is inherently conservative and philosophical progress comes from "sparkling new ideas," not argument. This assumes an untenable opposition between the generation and the evaluation of ideas, with argument relegated to evaluation. New ideas that contribute to progress arise from critical reflection on problems posed by the tradition, and constrained by the criteria governing evaluation. Thinking directed toward the criticism and evaluation of ideas or products is not algorithmic; it has a generative, creative component. An overall assessment in (...) any complex circumstance requires constructing a new view from the questioning, weighing, rejecting, reconciling, and integrating of numerous divergent points of view. Thus, the process of argumentation can issue in new ideas. (shrink)

This paper explores Bessie Head’s writing as a survival strategy through which she transformed her lived experience into imaginative literature, giving meaning and purpose to a life under permanent threat from the dominant group first in South Africa and later in Botswana. This threat included the destructive effect of the many fixed labels imposed upon her including: a ‘Coloured’ woman, the daughter of a woman designated mad, an exile, a psychotic, a tragic black woman, and a Third World woman writer. (...) Her endeavours to avoid and defeat such limited, static definitions produced work characterised by contradiction and paradox, through which she asserted her right to survive and determined, like Makhaya in When Rain Clouds Gather , to establish ‘a living life’ in place of the ‘living death that a man could be born into’ (Head 1989, 136). Through a combination of Head’s personal letters and papers and her published work, it can be seen how her particular preoccupations and experiences including her life in exile, her beliefs about her origins, her relationship to her absent mother, her distress, her madness and her need for love and for work were transformed into writing which expresses not only the destructive circumstances of her life but also its life-affirming aspects. Her writing was also a means by which she could create identities to express the dangers she encountered from the all-pervasive power structures which influenced her life and her sense of self, as well as ways to transcend them, enabling her to say in the last years of her life ‘I am no failure’ (20.2.1986 KMM BHP). (shrink)

In his classic text, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that the structural principles of a society are just when they issue from a procedure that is fair. One crucial feature that makes the procedure fair is that the persons who will be subjected to these principles choose them after they have deliberated together in a condition marked by a certain balance of knowledge and ignorance. In particular, these people know enough to consider principles that are workable, yet converse (...) behind a “veil of ignorance,” unable to predict what their place in society will be and hence discouraged from slanting the principles toward any preferential interests. My paper questions whether this attempt to ensure the disinterestedness of the conversation of justice is feasible. I worry that when we approach this question practically, we discover that the education that furnishes us with the knowledge necessary to choose viable principles must at the same time preclude genuine ignorance about our social position and interests. As an alternative, I suggest that we convene the conversation of justice behind a “veil of existence.” In this condition, people possess knowledge about how their society works and even about their places in it; however, this knowledge does not foster preferential interests because all interests are subjected to the question of their existential meaning. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains in his essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” for our interests to be truly meaningful, they must be affirmed as free responses to our thrownness into existence. Yet how do we find the wherewithal to make such responsible choices rather than lapse into paralysis before their essentially arbitrary differences? My positive thesis is that we may do so by acknowledging how all of us in this existential predicament critically and mutually provoke each to commit oneself to depart from the others in specific ways. This process of provocation is thus educational. It broaches a conception of non-instrumental, non-mimetic, liberal study, one which I try to enact in a writing that employs direct address, regular returns to questions that put discourse at a loss, and expanding webs of association. In this manner, I hope to demonstrate that liberal study may deepen our appreciation of our communal nature, our camaraderie, and thus motivate us to participate unselfishly in the conversation of justice. (shrink)

This paper examines the use of case studies in ethics education. While not dismissing their value for specific purposes, the paper shows the limits of their use. While agreeing that case studies are narratives, although rather thin stories, the paper argues that the claim that case studies could represent reality is difficult to sustain. Instead, the paper suggests a way of using stories in ethics teaching that could be more real for students, while also giving them a way of thinking (...) about their own professional practices. The paper shows how the method can be used to develop a more critical and reflective practice for students in the health care professions. Some immediate problems with the method are discussed. (shrink)

In this essay, the relation between art and religion is explored using the concepts experience and imagination as understood by the American philosopher John Dewey. In Dewey’s view, experience involves both the experiencer and the experienced: it is a phenomenon of the in-between. When we are really touched by what we meet in interacting with our physical and social surroundings, experience acquires an aesthetic quality that opens us to the value and the potential of what we perceive. We can see (...) the factual in light of the possible, thus enriching it with new layers of meaning. We experience this as resonance between us and the world. It is the work of the imagination. Due to their imaginative capacity, humans can aspire to a ‘good life’. This aspiration is discussed in terms of invitation and response. Can we experience ourselves as being invited to respond to this unruly world with attachment and care? Here art and religion come into play. Art is understood as the domain of the possible: it explores the world behind or beyond what we usually accept as fact. An aesthetic experience acquires religious quality when it evokes in us an ideal that guides our sense of self and world, stimulating us to realize our ideals in daily actions. If inspired by imagination, art and religion may evoke intense experiences of resonance and invite us to new ways of connecting and transformative action. This is explored with the help of a hermeneutical circle, a ‘cycle of imagination’. (shrink)

The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on ‘choice’ signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation (...) of the ‘self’. The paper illustrates how young women's narratives about marriage appear to suggest ‘modernity’ as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by ‘tradition’ and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which ‘a choosing person’ is consciously created as a mark of the family's modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the ‘choosing person’ is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the ‘right’ choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised ‘choosing person’ reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship. (shrink)

This dissertation attempts to fill, in part, three lacunae in contemporary philosophical scholarship: first, the failure to identify the two distinct types of dialogism—psychological and interpersonal—that have been operative in discussions of the dialogical self; second, the lack of acknowledgement of the six most prominent features of interpersonal dialogism; and third, the unwillingness to recognize that interpersonal dialogism is a crucial feature of human ethical agency and identity. In Chapter One, I explain why dialogism has been relatively neglected—and certainly underappreciated—in (...) contemporary Western philosophy. In Chapter Two, I offer a picture of Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of dialogism. I explain why and how Bakhtin focuses on the novel in his account of dialogism. I then offer an account of Bakhtin’s claim regarding the dialogism of the ‘inner’ speech of thought. In the second part of Chapter Two, I offer an account of Gadamer’s conception of dialogism. I begin my examination of Gadamer by discussing the event ontology that serves as the metaphysical framework for his account of “play” (Spiel) and dialogue. In doing so, I explain some of the most important ideas in this part of his thought, such as his notion of understanding, tradition, effective history, the fusion of horizons, and the text. I explain what Gadamer means by genuine conversation, or dialogue, and I then describe one of the most important ideas in Gadamer’s thought—his notion of “play.” In Chapter Three, I give a critical account of the most influential contemporary account of dialogism in psychology, offered by Hubert Hermans et al., specifically in terms of their establishment of dialogical self theory. My examination consists of several parts. First, I discuss the ways they conceptualize the self, temporally and spatially. Second, I offer a description of their account of I-positions within the dialogical self. Third, I examine their claims about the necessary features of the dialogical self, and argue against one of their claims, which says that dominance relations are intrinsic to dialogue. Fourth, I describe their account of the four kinds of relations that can emerge within the self (2010, 121). Fifth, I briefly discuss their view regarding the “[t]hree models of self and identity, associated with different historical phases” (4), that have predominated in Western history. Sixth, I consider their claim that there are “positions” within the self in addition to the “I-positions” noted above. And lastly, I evaluate their account of (what they call) the nine “features of good dialogue” (10). In Chapter Four, I offer a critical evaluation of the account of dialogue and dialogism developed by Dmitri Nikulin, arguably the leading contemporary philosopher on the subjects. While I address the features of his account that I think are correct, I ultimately argue that it is problematic for three main reasons: first, it fails to recognize the proper relationship between dialogue and agency; second, its elucidation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for dialogue contains conceptual inconsistencies; and third, its conception of the relation between dialogue and personhood has potentially disastrous ethical implications. In Chapter Five, I show how Heidegger’s notions of Dasein’s “Being-with” (Mitsein), “discourse” (Rede), and “solicitude” (Fursorge) help lay the groundwork for recognizing some important features of dialogism. I do three things in Chapter Six. First, I briefly discuss Charles Taylor’s work on dialogism. Second, I offer my account of the seven most prominent features of dialogism. And third, I argue that dialogism is a crucial feature of ethical agency and identity. To do so, I offer an example of a personal (and social) virtue, namely, empathy, which illustrates the important role dialogism plays in ethical agency. (shrink)

Ethical issues in healthcare and biomedical research are often a matter of public debate. This entry will explore several prominent views on how such debate should be conducted within pluralistic democratic societies. It begins by considering John Rawls’s account of public reason. It then examines how this account applies to the controversial issues of abortion and physician-assisted suicide, where one can see why some have objected to this view, especially with regard to the way it requires citizens to bracket their (...) comprehensive moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines. Next, this entry will consider some alternative approaches that endorse more expansive forms of public reason that allow greater room for appeals to comprehensive doctrines. While one might expect that many of the controversial issues in bioethics will continue to be a matter of public debate going forward, it will be seen that a necessary step towards making progress in these debates is to get clear on how such debate should be conducted. (shrink)

In Sensation's Ghost, Mangan elaborates on James's notion of fringe. We agree with Mangan that "the most important nonsensory experience is coherence or 'rightness'". Our critique presses for a fuller analysis of what Mangan calls feelings of rightness and wrongness. We first describe different types and levels of FOR/W and how types and levels interact. We also discuss sensitivity to and intensity of FOR/W, which vary systematically, and explain some of this systematicity. Finally, our elaboration of FOR/W helps explain the (...) personal significance of non-sensory or fringe experience -- something critical for James, especially in his later writings. (shrink)

We contend that the talk of therapy, like everyday talk, is where and how people construct their understandings and ways of living. This is the fundamental insight of the social constructionist, or discursive, therapies. ‘Meaning’ is not some pre-given ‘thing’ that is communicated more or less successfully from one individual to another. Rather, ‘meanings’ are negotiated or constructed in the process of communication until each party is clear that they have a grasp of what they are ‘talking about’. Similarly, ‘meanings’ (...) are not universal, nor necessarily arranged in a given ethical hierarchy, with some absolutely superior to others: ‘meanings’ are local and accountable in their locality. Yet, meanings, and actions following from them, are central to the conversations of therapy. In our view, the social constructionist or discursive therapies point to enhanced possibilities for collaborative and relevant conversations with clients. In this article we summarize themes common to contemporary discursive approaches to therapy. (shrink)

In this article a neo-Jamesian approach to the self is developed within a naturalistic, bottom-up, and systemic-relational framework. In this approach, consciousness of the body as one’s own body is a necessary precondition of self-consciousness as psychological self-awareness, and hence of a socially and historically situated narrative self. Thus we take on board the criticism of those accounts of the narrative self that pay little attention to embodiment, or go to the extreme of stating that the narrative self is abstract (...) and hence not embodied. But at the same time, we reject the idea that the embodiment of the narrative self is provided by a pre-reflective self-consciousness. By contrast, we view self-consciousness as a construction all the way down, which develops from automatic and pre-reflective processing of representations of objects (object-consciousness), through awareness and then self-awareness of the body, up to introspective self-awareness and then narrative identity. This form of constructivism is a naturalistic reinterpretation of the Hegelian idea that selfhood is socially constructed and self-experience intersubjectively mediated. However, it enables to move away from that blend of narrativism and epiphenomenism that characterizes some strands of the socio-constructivist approach to the narrative self. The storied Me that the selfing process makes is not “empty chatter”, but rather a causally efficacious layer of personality viewed as a self-unifying system. (shrink)

: This study is an analysis of the theological and ethical dimensions inthe writings of Adam Smith. It deals with aspects of philosophy and intellectualhistory. By revealing the theological and ethical roots of Smith’s writings in theformation of modern economics, arguments for an economics that is based onIslamic foundations become stronger. The study will therefore lay out the basicmoral project of Smith and then contextualize it in the Western Enlightenmenttradition. It shows how religious discourses were instrumental in shaping thethoughts and (...) ideas of Enlightenment in general, and economics in particular.The study will then give a brief overview of traditional Islamic theology andethics in order to give directions for future research. (shrink)

I provide an explanation of moral understanding. I begin by describing decisions, es- pecially moral ones. I detail ways in which deviations from an ideal of decision-making occur. I link deviations to characteristic critical judgments, e.g. being cavalier, banal, coura- geous, etc. Moral judgments are among these and carry a particular personal gravity. The question I entertain in following chapters is: how do they carry this gravity? In answering the question, I try “external” accounts of moral understanding. I distin- guish (...) between the ideas of a person and a life. The idea of a life essayed is of a network of relations to others. The character of those relations, e.g. friendship, is the object of our understanding of ourselves and our lives. I argue that one’s understanding of oneself conditions the context of decision-making. I elaborate one way of making moral under- standing answerable to truth using Plato’s metaphysics in the Philebus. Truth is valued and truth is essential to the independence of the moral such that seeming right and being right are distinct. However, truth is neither primary nor exhaustive of morality, because we have additional distinct resources for morally judging others. I turn instead to an “internal” account of moral understanding to answer the question regarding the personal gravity of moral criticism. Using Winch’s work on universalizabil- ity and fellowship, I argue that our conception of others must be sufficient to reflect their individuality within our moral understanding. Second, using Gaita’s work on remorse and the lucidity of self-reflection, I argue that the truth about ourselves and the wrong we do others can arrest and constrain our moral understanding and our authority. Moral understanding operates in a social milieu: argument, conversation and rational- ity. Arguments are grounded in meanings with primary (shared) sense, but solicit agree- ment in secondary sense—of what is similar, of what follows. Meaning in the secondary sense can be necessarily practical, creating practical necessities within points of view. Accounting for the consequences and understanding of disagreement is identified as pressing. An original contribution is the idea of critical authority. One’s articulation of moral meaning is controlled via the critical authority expressed using critical vocabulary. Accepting another’s critical authority is based, in differing domains, on our relation to them, e.g. friendship, trust, fellowship. The nature of inter-personal relations are delim- ited by the critical authority characteristic of those relations. Critical authority explains the independent and personal force of moral criticism. To be intelligible depends on accepting some critical authorities, though I allow for the intelligible repudiation of morality in some circumstances. Wronging someone is ex- plained as denying his critical authority, thus denying his relation to oneself, and thereby undermining his place in the moral world. The consequence of wrongdoing is the disinte- gration of the moral world. I defend against Nagel’s realism and Korsgaard’s constructivism. Both are committed to judging individuals but their accounts of morality undermine the intelligibility of the personal gravity of moral criticism. Developing the idea of Moral Consensus, I defend myself against the related charge of relativism. (shrink)

In our current education system learning is organized as a series of sequential steps and the curriculum is constituted by a set of independent objects. Here students are not encouraged to make connections between subjects or between the subjects and their own personal lives. In this positivistic view of reality teaching is reduced to technique. This thesis is a reflection on the nature and importance of a more holistic and interconnected education. Using the concept of "non-linear learning" as an organizing (...) principle, it outlines the various components of an alternative paradigm. (shrink)

While research on meaningfulnesss in life is becoming increasingly popular in analytic philosophy, there is still a dearth of literature on the topic of meaninglessness. This is surprising, given that a better understanding of the nature of meaninglessness may help to illuminate features of meaningfulness previously unobserved or misunderstood. Additionally, the topic of meaninglessness is interesting in its own right - independent of what it can tell us about meaningfulness. In my dissertation, I construct and defend my own conception of (...) meaninglessness. -/- I adopt Thaddeus Metz's (2013) analysis of meaninglessness presented in his new book, Meaning in Life: An Analytic Study. For Metz, meaninglessness is not the absence of meaningfulness but a positively bad state to be in - one that can detract from the overall meaningfulness of a life. I distinguish between the following: negative meaning (i.e., meaninglessness as a dis-value), positive meaning (i.e., meaningfulness), and lives that lack positive meaning. I defend a conception of negative meaning. In contrast, most conceptions of meaninglessness are conceptions of lives where positive meaning is absent. Philosophers defending these conceptions have yet to acknowledge the existence of negative meaning. I explain why conceptions of meaninglessness (as the absence of positive meaning) are inadequate and I provide support for the existence of negative meaning. (shrink)

Resumo: Em 1835, Kierkegaard escrevia que “o que de fato falta para mim é encontrar uma verdade que seja uma verdade para mim, encontrar a ideia pela qual eu viverei e morrerei”. Ora, mais de 50 anos antes Rousseau escrevera que “[s]ua filosofia [a dos filósofos sistemáticos] é para os outros; ser-me-ia necessária uma para mim”. O curioso, porém, é que Kierkegaard desenvolveria sua produção independentemente da de Rousseau, com a qual ele viria a ter contato apenas por volta de (...) 1850, quando a maior parte de seus escritos já havia sido produzida e publicada. Assim, diante de tais coincidências, proponho uma confrontação entre alguns dos principais conceitos existenciais presentes nas obras desses pensadores, com o que pretendo não apenas iluminar os laços existentes entre suas obras, como também reavaliar o papel de proeminência de Rousseau em termos do desenvolvimento da chamada filosofia da existência. Palavras-chave: existência; indivíduo; subjetividade; consciência; sistema; filosofia da existência. (shrink)

Existentialist thought is an emerging area of significance to leadership learning. This in part appears due to leadership discourse being captured by the modern rationalist tradition; this tends to encourage leadership research to seek at times to present a coherent and unified understanding which some regard as unsatisfying or reductive. This dissatisfaction adds to the idea that leadership is a contested topic as well as open to new paths of enquiry. Existentialist thought offers a thematic that straddles rationalist and non-rationalist (...) discourse as it gives privilege to the totality of existence. Such broad notions leave its links to leadership as tenuous. However, recent leadership research considers key existentialist notions as of renewed interest: such as, freedom, edification and authenticity. Leaders at least appear referent in their practice to these as well as other areas that existentialists find crucial to their 'basket of thought'. Further groundwork in linking these two areas appears a new opportunity for leadership enquiry. Key words Existentialism, leadership, self, authenticity, rationalism, post-rationalism, freedom. (shrink)