In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure instrument of God's power, so that his own motives (...) and character are entirely indifferent as long as he carries out his priestly duties. In modernity, Agamben argues, the Christian priest has become the model ethical subject. We see this above all in Kantian ethics. Contrasting the Christian and modern ontology of duty with the classical ontology of being, Agamben contends that Western philosophy has unfolded in the tension between the two. This latest installment in the study of Western political structures begun in Homo Sacer is a contribution to the study of liturgy, an extension of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, and a reworking of Heidegger's history of Being. (shrink)

While most discussions of corruption focus on administration, institutions, the law and public policy, little attention in the debate about societal reform is paid to the “internalities” of anti-corruption efforts, specifically to character-formation and issues of personal and corporate integrity. While the word “integrity” is frequently mentioned as the goal to be achieved through institutional reforms, even in criminal prosecutions, the specifically philosophical aspects of character-formation and the development of corporate and individual virtues in a rational and systematic way tend (...) to be neglected. This paper focuses on the “internalities” of anti-corruption work with special emphasis on the pre-requisites that need to be ensured on behalf of the social elites in order for proper individual and collective character- formation to take place throughout the society. The author argues that a systematic pursuit of socially recognised virtues, both those pertaining to society as a whole and those specific to particular professions and social groups, is the most comprehensive and strategically justified way of pursuing anti-corruption policy, while institutional and penal policies can only serve an auxiliary role. The pursuit of institutional and criminal justice policies against corruption in a society that is subject to increasing relativism with regard to values and morality is at best ineffective, and at worst socially destructive. Thus the paper suggests a re-examination of the social discourse on the level of what the author calls “value strategy” and the gradual building of a plan to create and solidify specifically designed features of “corporate character” for key sectors of the society. This approach can serve as the main long-term strategy to improve the public profile of integrity and reinforce morality in both the public and civil sectors. (shrink)

The paper discusses the manner and extent to which Epicurean ethics can serve as a general philosophy of life, capable of supporting philosophical practice in the form of philosophical counseling. Unlike the modern age academic philosophy, the philosophical practice movement portrays the philosopher as a personal or corporate adviser, one who helps people make sense of their experiences and find optimum solutions within the context of their values and general preferences. Philosophical counseling may rest on almost any school of philosophy, (...) ranging — in the Western tradition from Platonism to the philosophy of language or logic. While any specialist school of philosophy may serve valuable purposes by elucidating specific aspects of one’s experiences and directing future action, the more ‘generalist’ the philosophy used as the basis for counseling is, the broader and more far-reaching its potential impact on the person undergoing counseling. Epicurean ethics is a prime example of a philosophy of life that is suitable for philosophical counseling today. Its closer examination reveals that, contrary to superficial opinion, it is not opposed to Stoicism and may in fact incorporate Stoicism and its antecedent virtues (including many Christian virtues) in a simple yet comprehensive practical system of directions for modern counseling. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: List of figures. -- Acknowledgments. -- Introduction. -- Part One: Fundamental Issues. -- Part Two: The Transition from the Aristotelian Worldview to the Newtonian Worldview. -- Part Three: Recent Developments in Science and Worldviews. -- Chapter Notes and Suggested Reading. -- References. -- Index.

The Critique of the Power of Judgment (a more accurate rendition of what has hitherto been translated as the Critique of Judgment) is the third of Kant's great critiques following the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. This entirely new translation of Kant's masterpiece follows the principles and high standards of all other volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. This volume includes: for the first time the indispensable first draft of Kant's (...) introduction to the work; the only English edition notes to the many differences between the first (1790) and second (1793) editions of the work; and relevant passages in Kant's anthropology lectures where he elaborated on his aesthetic views. All in all this new edition offers the serious student of Kant a dramatically richer, more complete and more accurate translation. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

There has been a good deal of interest in moral sentimentalism in recent years, but most of that interest has been exclusively either in meta-ethical questions or in normative issues about caring or benevolence. The present book seeks to offer a systematically unified picture of both sorts of topics by making central use of the notion of empathy. The hope is that such an approach will give sentimentalism a "second chance" against the ethical rationalism that has typically dominated the landscape (...) of ethical theory. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most influential thinkers of the past 150 years and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is his most important work on ethics and politics. A polemical contribution to moral and political theory, it offers a critique of moral values and traces the historical evolution of concepts such as guilt, conscience, responsibility, law and justice. This is a revised and updated edition of one of the most successful volumes to appear in Cambridge Texts in the (...) History of Political Thought. Keith Ansell-Pearson has modified his introduction to Nietzsche's classic text, and Carol Diethe has incorporated a number of changes to the translation itself, reflecting the considerable advances in our understanding of Nietzsche in the twelve years since this edition first appeared. In this new guise the Cambridge Texts edition of Nietzsche's Genealogy should continue to enjoy widespread adoption, at both undergraduate and graduate level. (shrink)

Contrary to current belief among many philosophers, I attempt to show that philosophical counseling is a form of psychotherapy that is in need of structure and guidance in order for it to prosper as a viable approach to mental health treatment. Methodological approaches are examined including dialectical, solution-oriented, and long-term considerations that comprise the nature of meaning analysis and procedural inquiry. If philosophical counseling is to gain recognition among the helping professions, it will need to embrace a philo-psychological paradigm of (...) theory and practice that emphasizes philosophical eclecicism. (shrink)

The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is that he looks to himself for all help or harm.– Epictetus [Enchiridion, 48]Make your rules of life brief, yet so as to embrace the fundamentals; recurrence to them will then suffice to remove all vexation, and send you back without fretting to the duties to which you must return. – Marcus Aurelius [Meditations, Book Four, 3]Epictetus was born a slave. Marcus Aurelius became an emperor. Both were Stoics, and adhered to the same (...) root principles of self-discipline, broadly sharing an understanding of the human condition. In this paper, I present, in skeletal outline, a simple program of personal governance derived from Roman Stoicism as espoused by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. What I have dubbed “The IDEAMethod” is my attempt to resuscitate a few central tenets of Stoic counsel and to explain and defend their efficacy for responding rationally and effectively to the many vicissitudes and challenges endemic to the human condition. I hope to breathe a bit of new life into a Stoic analysis of self-disciplinary propriety that served the needs of a slave, an emperor, and innumerable lives lived between those two material extremes. (shrink)

The essay examines the central role that pleasure plays in a wide range of conceptualisations of happiness or ‘good life’, from Epicurean hedonism, to Christian asceticism, to contemporary cases of pastoral and philosophical counselling. Despite the apparent moral chasm between hedonists and ascetics, a look at the practices promoted by Epicurus and the Christian monastic fathers reveals striking similarities. The reason is that, at a fundamental level, both parties agree that one should reject the vulgar pleasures that society glorifies, and (...) develop a refined attitude that seeks the appropriate and natural pleasures, while ignoring the harmful or unnecessary ones. And such an attitude can only be acquired through moral training, either by philosophical instruction and reflection, or by pastoral counselling. We highlight some important parallels regarding the connection between pleasure and happiness, as conceived by Epicureans and monastic fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. We begin by discussing elements of Epicureanism that can also be found in its rival philosophical schools and Christianity, mainly the emphasis on forming the right conception of happiness and acting in accordance with it. We then examine the connection between morality and happiness in the Christian Orthodox monasticism. We argue that Christian ascetic ethics not only condone some types of pleasures, but in fact require them as elements of happiness in this life that play an instrumental role for the Christian soteriological dogma. The argument has wider philosophical significance because it shows that pleasure is indeed a fundamental conceptual ingredient of happiness across different normative ethical contexts. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between virtue, values and both individual and collective identity.

Raspravu o pluralizmu u području filozofije autor otvara razlikovanjem institucionalne i supstancionalne razine filozofskog pluralizma. Dok se institucionalni pluralizam odnosi na vanjske uvjete i okolnosti mišljenja i obilježava otvorenost i neutralnost filozofskih institucija, supstancionalni pluralizam izražava odnos prema istini kao imanentnom cilju svakog mišljenja. U tom odnosu pluralizam gubi svaki smisao, jer se istina može pluralizirati samo u svojim aspektima, pa se, sukladno tome, i supstancijalni pluralizam može odraziti kao pluralizam perspektiva . Pluriperspektivizam se, u razlici prema relativističkom perspektivizmu, pobliže (...) određuje kao integrativni perspektivizam, odnosno kao interaktivno povezivanje perspektiva u metodološkom obrascu stvaranja orijentacijskog znanja. Paradigma orijentacijskog znanja, koja se artikulira u protuteži prema monoperspektivizmu novovjeke znanosti, postaje tako duhovnim obilježjem nove epohe. U članku se ekspliciraju kategorijalna razlikovanja "objektne i smisaone istine" , te s druge strane "uporabnog i orijentacijskog znanja" , kako bi se prijelom svjetskopovijesnih epoha mogao izraziti ne samo sredstvima teorije istine nego istodobno obrazložiti i na epistemološkoj razini.Die Diskussion über den Pluralismus im Bereich der Philosophie eröffnet der Autor mit der Unter-scheidung zwischen einer institutionalen und einer substantiellen Ebene innerhalb des philosophischenPluralismus. Während sich der institutionale Pluralismus auf die äußeren Bedingungenund Umstände des Denkens bezieht sowie die Offenheit und Neutralität philosophischer Institutionencharakterisiert, bringt der substantielle Pluralismus den Bezug zur Wahrheit als das immanenteZiel allen Denkens zum Ausdruck. In diesem Bezug verliert der Pluralismus jeglichen Sinn,da die Wahrheit nur in ihren Aspekten pluralisiert werden kann, sodass demgemäß der substantiellePluralismus nur als ein Pluralismus von Perspektiven vertretbar ist. ImUnterschied zum relativistischen Perspektivismus wird der Pluriperspektivismus als ein integrativerPerspektivismus bestimmt bzw. als ein interaktives Verknüpfen von Perspektiven nach einem metho-dologischen Verfahren zur Erzeugung von Orientierungswissen. Das Paradigma des Orientierungs-wissens, das sich als Gegengewicht zum Monoperspektivismus der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft artikuliert,wird so zum geistigen Merkmal der neuen Epoche. Der Verfasser expliziert die kategorialeUnterscheidung zwischen »Objekt- und Sinnwahrheit« einerseits und zwischen»Verfügungs- und Orientierungswissen« andererseits, welche die weltgeschichtlicheEpochenwende nicht nur mit den Mitteln der Wahrheitstheorie zum Ausdruck bringen, sondernsie zugleich auch auf epistemologischer Ebene begründen soll. (shrink)