This paper is, in part, a report on the conclusions reached at a retreat on Part One of Kant's Conflict of the Faculties, held at the Center for Insight into Philosophic Health, Education, and Renewal, in Mendocino, California. It argues that Kant's distinction between the public and private spheres does not remove but intensifies the philosopher's duty to influence the general public. I conclude with some reflections on how a Kantian philosopher might have a positive influence on religious (...) communities. Includes an appendix coauthored by Richard W. Mapplebeckpalmer. (shrink)

With An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784) and What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (1786), Kant presents the concept of public use of reason and defines its requirements, scope, and function. In outline, the public use of reason consists in sharing one’s thoughts with “the entire public of the world of readers” (8:37). As for its requirements, to the extent that someone communicates in their own person, i.e. not in the exercise of their function (...) as a public official, and bases their reasoning on universalizable grounds, their use of reason qualifies as public and shall be free from state censorship. Therefore, Kant’s concept of public use reason aims to establish a public debate that is free and includes in its scope, both as subjects and recipients, potentially all adult men. The ultimate function of the public use of reason is to foster moral progress and, with it, the reform of the political community according to the republican ideal. However, it is commonly held that Kant, with his 1798 essay The Conflict of the Faculties, deprives his notion of public use of reason of its progressive core and adjusts it to the absolutist conception of speech and civil service. Characterizations of state officials as “not free to make public use of their learning” (7:18) and “bound to uphold whatever […] the crown sanctions for them to expound publicly” (7:8), as well as the depiction of laypeople as “incompetent” (7:18) and “resigned to understanding nothing about [the sciences]” (7:34), have led influential interpreters to read Kant as redefining his notion of public use of reason by restricting its subjects to university professors and its recipients to government members (e.g. John Christian Laursen 1986, rpt. 1992 and 1996; Kevin Davis 1992; Steven Lestition 1993; Jay Franzel 2013). On my reading, with The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant does indeed redefine the concept of public use of reason making concessions to the absolutist notion of speech and civil service. However, a close reading of the text reveals that the public use of reason ends up being reaffirmed in its progressive core and extended in its scope. To substantiate my interpretation, I will systematically analyse and classify each of the 68 occurrences of the adjective ‘public’ in The Conflict of the Faculties and show how Kant employs the absolutist vocabulary to convey the progressive project of his previous writings. Accordingly, I argue that Kant holds on to the free public use of reason as a means to reform politics according to the republican ideal and that the employment of the absolutist vocabulary is motivated by a pragmatic attitude and a provocative stance. (shrink)

It is commonly held that Kant, with his 1798 essay The Conflict of the Faculties, relinquishes some progressive stances and retreats to conservative positions. According to several interpreters, this is especially evident from Kant’s discussion of moral progress and public use of reason. Kant avers that moral progress can only occur through state-sanctioned education “from top to bottom” and entrusts the emergence of a state endowed with the relevant resolution and ability to “a wisdom from above” (7:92-93). According (...) to numerous interpreters, this call for state intervention and the accompanying surrender to a superhuman wisdom manifest Kant’s retreat from initially republican to later conservative positions. In Kant’s previous writings, the notion of public use of reason indicates the unrestricted freedom to communicate one’s thoughts, provided that the communication does not take place in the exercise of one’s function as a state official, and potentially encompasses all adult men. Instead, in The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant contrasts university professors’ freedom to make public use of their reason with the other public officials’ obligation “to uphold whatever […] the crown sanctions for them to expound publicly” (07:08). Thus, according to several scholars, Kant ends up disenfranchising the vast majority of people from the public use of reason and adjusting an emancipatory notion to the absolutist conception of speech and civil service. On my reading, with The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant neither retreats to conservative positions nor softens any progressive tenets of critical philosophy. On the contrary, I intend to show that a) the project of a state-sanctioned education constitutes Kant’s republican rebuttal of conservative positions on their ground, and is fully in keeping with critical philosophy; b) Kant sets forth a new notion of public use of reason that reverses the order of moral progress presented in his previous writings, but retains all its emancipatory character. I intend to support my interpretation by a) conducting a rhetorical analysis showing how Kant’s rhetoric aims to persuade the ruler that his interests are best served by fostering the regulative ideas of pure practical reason as discovered by critical philosophy; b) analysing Kant’s use of the term ‘public’ (both as the adjective ‘öffentlich’ and the noun ‘Publikum’) and showing how it retains its wide scope and emancipatory function and even expands them to areas previously subjected to legitimate censorship. (shrink)

This paper is, in part, a report on the conclusions reached at a retreat on Part One of Kant's Conflict of the Faculties, held at the Center for Insight into Philosophic Health, Education, and Renewal, in Mendocino, California. It argues that Kant's distinction between the public and private spheres does not remove but intensifies the philosopher's duty to influence the general public. I conclude with some reflections on how a Kantian philosopher might have a positive influence on religious (...) communities. Includes an appendix coauthored by Richard W. Mapplebeckpalmer. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is on Kant and on a text which has often been drawn upon when talking about the present situation of philosophy at university, namely his 'The Conflict of the Faculties' of 1798. Kant’s claims, though not applicable to the contemporary situation directly, can indeed be worked out in a way which can assign a distinct and clearly identifiable role for university-based philosophy. I need to emphasize, though, that I am not suggesting that this (...) is the only way Kant’s thoughts in this respect can be adapted to and utilized for such an account. Quite the contrary, Kant’s text offers a manifold of highly important options here. In my article I will seek to establish the following claims: a) Kant, in his later years, which therefore amounts to something like his “mature” position, subscribed to a conception of a public use of reason which mainly referred to the Faculties of Philosophy at universities. b) Kant’s dismissal of philosophy according to the school conception of it must not be taken as a dismissal of academic philosophy altogether. Philosophy practiced at university by professionals is vital for Kant to build philosophy as a fully worked out discipline and to answer questions revolving around the issue of the compatibility of the theoretical standpoint and Kant’s own moral theory. c) Neither a) nor b) can be immediately applied to the contemporary situation we find ourselves in. Combining elements of a) and b), however, a possible route for the actualization of Kant’s ideas may open up. At least one of the functions for which university-based philosophy is uniquely qualified is the assessment of the implications of progress in the natural sciences for the conception of a moral standpoint in general, and as such for a core element of our self-understanding as rational beings. (shrink)

With respect to the topic of “powers and abilities,” most readers will associate David Hume with his multi-pronged critique of traditional attempts to make robust explanatory use of those notions in a philosophical or scientific context. But Hume’s own philosophy is also structured around the attribution to human beings of a variety of basic faculties or mental powers – such as the reason and the imagination, or the various powers involved in Hume’s account of im- pressions of reflection and (...) the passions. Indeed, there is a clear case to be made that, despite his deflationary account of our concept of power, Hume continues to treat certain basic powers or faculties as forming the explanatory bedrock for his new “science of man”. In this essay, I will discuss how this apparent conflict between the “critical” (if not outright skeptical) and “constructive” aspects of Hume’s discussion of powers and abilities is best resolved – with special attention to the question of how this illuminates Hume’s place in the development of early modern conceptions of the proper method for philosophy. (shrink)

This is a Belarusian translation of an essay interpreting the much-neglected Second Part of Kant's book, Conflict of the Faculties, entitled “An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?”, by showing the close relationship between the themes it deals with and those Kant addresses in the Supplements and Appendices of Perpetual Peace. In both works, Kant portrays the philosopher as having the duty to promote a “secret article”, without which his vision of a lasting international (...) peace through the agency of a federation of states is bound to fail. Both works identify this article as involving the necessity of publicity as a transcendental condition for peace, and call for philosophers to engage politicians and lawyers in a creative attitude towards lawmaking. Kant’s visionary program has failed to reach its goal up to now, not because it is too idealistic, but because philosophers have failed to take up the challenge. (shrink)

This essay interprets the much-neglected Second Part of The Conflict of the Faculties, entitled “An old question raised again: Is the human race constantly progressing?”, by showing the close relationship between the themes it deals with and those Kant addresses in the Supplements and Appendices of Perpetual Peace. In both works, Kant portrays the philosopher as having the duty to promote a “secret article”, without which his vision of a lasting international peace through the agency of a federation (...) of states is bound to fail. Both works identify this article as involving the necessity of publicity as a transcendental condition for peace, and call for philosophers to engage politicians and lawyers in a creative attitude towards lawmaking. Kant’s visionary program has failed to reach its goal up to now, not because it is too idealistic, but because philosophers have failed to take up the challenge. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that the Faculty of Language is compositional, i.e., that it computes the meaning of complex expressions from the meanings of their immediate constituents and their structure. I fargue that compositionality and other competing constraints on the way in which the Faculty of Language computes the meanings of complex expressions should be understood as hypotheses about innate constraints of the Faculty of Language. I then argue that, unlike compositionality, most of the currently available non-compositional constraints predict (...) incorrect patterns of early linguistic development. This supports the view that the Faculty of Language is com- positional. More generally, this paper presents a way of framing the compositionality debate (by focusing on its implications for language acquisition) that can lead to its even- tual resolution, so it will hopefully also interest theorists who disagree with its main conclusion. (shrink)

The growth in neoliberal or market-driven higher education has challenged traditional approaches to evaluating faculty members. The involvement of multiple stakeholders (i.e., accreditation bodies, quality assurance officers, administrators, teaching faculty, and students) has led to different and sometimes conflicting needs in faculty evaluation. While extant literature generally suggests that faculty evaluation in contemporary higher education is strongly associated with accountability purposes, little is known about how key agents at the institutional level use evaluation for learning and improvement. Thus, this study (...) attempts to identify the approaches to faculty evaluation that promote learning and improvement in higher education. This study is a qualitative case study of Vietnamese higher education student evaluation of teaching (SET) and voting evaluation practices. It adopts the problem-based methodology (Robinson, 1993; Robinson & Lai, 2006) to investigate the theories of action of some key stakeholders of these faculty evaluation practices in Vietnam. The theories of action comprise the stakeholders’ approaches to faculty evaluation, together with the constraints (that rule in or rule out specific approaches) and the consequences of the approaches. Participants included four quality assurance officers, 18 administrators, and 20 faculty members from seven public higher education institutions in Vietnam. The theories of action about faculty evaluation were constructed based on interviews and key evaluation documents. Overall, the participants took three main approaches to faculty evaluation: (i) complying with the expected evaluation procedures and roles, (ii) taking a harmony-oriented and unilateral approach to problem solving, and (iii) disengaging from evaluation for learning and improvement. The participants generally fulfilled the evaluation policy requirements, but their approaches had a limited impact on learning and improvement at the institutional level. The constraint analysis suggests that the participants’ approaches were not completely passive but were mainly oriented to managerial accountability demands (Røiseland et al., 2015). The participants’ collectivist Confucian harmony-oriented norms hindered their approaches to problem solving and using evaluation for learning and improvement. However, there were a few participants who acted on their own values rather than being confined by political and cultural constraints. In spite of its scarcity, these participants’ self-reliant approach suggests a potential influence of Buddhist principles of self-transformation, contextuality and reflexivity on improving practices (Chu & Vu, 2021; Thich Nhat Hanh, 1987). The study has two key implications. First, it suggests the improvement of faculty evaluation policymaking and implementation by revising several existing constraints and by adding some cultural and individual constraints to the current theories of action. The faculty evaluation problems could be solved by improving the quality of evaluation processes and data, reconceptualising SET and voting evaluation, and treating faculty members’ underperformance as a collective problem. Second, the study suggests a framework to predict the likely success of future intervention on faculty evaluation. For instance, faculty evaluation for learning and improvement will be more feasible if policymakers and implementers prioritise transformational purposes and make joint efforts to foster dialogues and collaboration among individuals and groups. My study also highlights the need to understand faculty evaluation, and possibly other higher education practices in Vietnam, in religious contexts and from individual participants’ spiritual values or philosophical backgrounds. The study implications are applicable to Vietnamese higher education and potentially to other educational settings with similar characteristics. (shrink)

While numerous commentators have discussed Kant’s views on mysticism in general, very few of them have examined Kant’s specific views on different types of mystical experience. I suggest that Kant’s views on direct mystical experience differ substantially from his views on indirect mystical experience (IME). In this paper, I focus on Kant’s complex views on IME in both his pre-critical and critical writings and lectures. In the first section, I examine Kant’s early work, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, where he defends (...) the possibility that the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg’s alleged visions of the spirit-world are veridical cases of IME. In the second section, I discuss Kant’s views on IME during his critical period. I first argue that the epistemology of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason accommodates the possibility of IME. I then examine Kant’s views on Swedenborgian visions in his lectures from the 1770s to the 1790s and argue that his critical views on Swedenborg are largely continuous with his pre-critical views in Dreams. Finally, I examine passages in Kant’s late works, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone and The Conflict of the Faculties, where he discusses three non-Swedenborgian types of IME. In the final section, I explore briefly how Kant’s views on IME relate to contemporary debates among analytic philosophers of religion regarding the nature and possibility of mystical experience. (shrink)

The harmonious free play of the imagination and understanding is at the heart of Kant’s account of beauty in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, but interpreters have long struggled to determine what Kant means when he claims the faculties are in a state of free play. In this article, I develop an interpretation of the free play of the faculties in terms of the freedom of attention. By appealing to the different way that we attend to (...) objects in aesthetic experience, we can explain how the faculties are free, even when the subject already possesses a concept of the object and is bound to the determinate form of the object in perception. (shrink)

This paper begins the last instalment of a six-part project correlating the key aspects of Kant’s architectonic conception of philosophy with a special version of the Chinese Book of Changes that I call the “Compound Yijing”, which arranges the 64 hexagrams (gua) into both fourfold and threefold sets. I begin by briefly summarizing the foregoing articles: although Kant and the Yijing employ different types of architectonic reasoning, the two systems can both be described in terms of three “levels” of elements. (...) Starting at an unnumbered level devoid of any element (the tao or thing in itself), the system proceeds by elaborating a key fourfold distinction (or “quaternity”) on the first level, a twelvefold distinction on the second level, and twelve quaternities (grouped in four quadrants, each with a set of three quaternities) on the third level. Each set of three quaternities (i.e., each quadrant) on the third level corresponds to one of the four “faculties” of the university, as elaborated in Kant’s book, The Conflict of the Faculties. Previous papers have examined the correlations between three key quaternities that Kant defends in relation to each of three faculties (philosophy, theology, and law) and the 12 gua that correspond to that faculty in the Compound Yijing. The final step is to explore the fourth quaternity on the third level, the 12 gua corresponding to the medical faculty. The “idea of reason” in Kant’s metaphysics that guides this wing of the comparative analysis is freedom, and the ultimate purpose of this faculty of the university is to train doctors to care for people’s physical well-being, as free agents imbedded in nature. But this paper will focus only on the four gua that correspond to four basic concepts in Kant’s theory of medicine. The two quaternities in the “yin-yang” (medical) quadrant of the Compound Yijing that will be skipped here are as follows. First, Kant’s account of the idea of freedom itself, which gives rise to the area of traditional metaphysics known as rational cosmology, comes in the first Critique’s Dialectic, in the section on the Antinomy of Reason (CPR A405-567/B432- 595). There he examines four irresolvable issues: whether the world has a beginning in time; whether composite substances consist of simple parts; whether a causality of freedom operates in the natural world; and whether an absolutely necessary being exists. Later I will argue that these correspond to the quaternity consisting of gua 15, 22, 36, and 52. (shrink)

This study aims to look at the role of the practice of excellence strategies in education in achieving sustainable competitive advantage for the Higher educational institutions of the faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, a model, and the study considered the competitive advantage of educational institutions stems from the impact on the level of each student, employee, and the institution. The study was based on the premise that the development of strategies for excellence in education, (...) and its implementation is a vital important prerequisite to achieve sustainable competitive advantage in higher educational institutions. The study followed a systematic exploratory descriptive methodology through review of the theoretical literature, and the adoption of the experience of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza as a model for its unique experience in the field of excellence in education. The study results showed that the most important are: There is a strong correlation between the level of exercising excellence strategies in education and the achievement of higher educational institutions to the sustainable competitive advantage. The results include a general required number of important sub results on the subject of the model - Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Azhar University in Gaza as follows: - The student considered the academic focus of the operation in the development process of the workers’ skills, particularly academics at the university helps to distinguish students and increase the employment rate after graduation. - The existence of consistency in development efforts and quality improvement for all three levels (student, employee, and the university), and this contributes to the Faculty excellence. - The Faculty has been able to achieve competitive advantages by offering excellent services without harming the efficiency, and this alone is a great success because improving service properties requires great investments, which negatively affect the continued institutional development. The study also reached a set of recommendations as follows: - The need to exercise excellence strategies in education, excellence reward at the national level, and those higher educational institutions follow the criteria for measuring the competitive advantages of its institutions always. - There is a need to increase efforts to implement programs of excellence, the allocation of adequate time, reward outstanding efforts as well. There is a necessity for each faculty to achieve competitive advantage and sustainability, using the general philosophies of competitive advantage, but with a different strategically content from what is in the private commercial sector, it reflects the Faculties mission and objectives, depending on making improvements and excellence in processes that ensure the safety of its outputs. As well as the need to find a balance between the work of teaching and research work of the faculty members, this has important implications regarding the criteria used in the process of excellence evaluation. The study recommended the adoption of strategies for excellence in education on a national public policy level mainly in the processes of change in higher education institutions. The need to support the existence of a common understanding of the efforts of excellence to create a general culture that appreciates excellence in faculties and universities. This underlines the need for transparent, fair rewards systems, to encourage innovation in education. The need to conduct a comprehensive surveys on the graduates of faculties and universities including the areas of employment and skills, because that will give accurate indications of the graduates and will help to establish a link to a more precise about the relationship of excellence strategies with the competitive advantages. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a solution to a notorious puzzle that lies at the heart of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The puzzle arises because Kant asserts two apparently conflicting claims: (1) F→J: A judgment of beauty is aesthetic, i.e., grounded in feeling. (2) J→F: A judgment of beauty could not be based on and must ground the feeling of pleasure in the beautiful. I argue that (1) and (2) are consistent. Kant’s text indicates that he distinguishes two feelings: the (...) feeling of the harmony of the cognitive faculties that is the ground of judgments of beauty (F1 → J), and the feeling of pleasure that is its consequence (J → F2). I develop and defend a view of Kant’s account of the structure of judgments of beauty that incorporates this crucial distinction. Next, I argue that my view resolves another long-standing problem for Kant’s “Deduction” of judgments of beauty: it allows him to claim that the harmony of the faculties is a condition of judgment in general without implying, absurdly, that all judgments are pleasurable. (shrink)

My paper provides reasons in support of the view that vague identity claims originate from a conflict between rigidity and precision in designation. To put this stricly, let x be the referent of the referential terms P and Q. Then, that the proposition “that any x being both a P and a Q” is vague involves that the semantic intuitions at work in P and Q reveal a conflict between P and Q being simultaneously rigid and precise designators. (...) After having shortly commented on an example of vague identity claim, I make the case for my proposal, by discussing how reference by baptism conflicts with descriptive attitudes towards understanding conceptual contents. (shrink)

This essay experiments with Kant’s writings on rational religion distilled through the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as canonical confrontations with primal problems of evil. It suggests boundaries between Stevenson’s characters and their occupations comparable to the those conflicted in the Kantian university, namely, law, medicine, theology, and philosophy (which makes a short anticipatory appearance in his earlier text on rational religion). With various faculties it investigates diffuse comprehensions—respectively, legal crime, biogenetic transmission, and original sin—of key (...) ethical modes: will, inheritance, incorporation, freedom, duty, obligation, love, living, and killing to conclude on the possible logic of evil (or evils of logic) collateral and possibly innate to Kant’s comprehension of radical evil. (shrink)

To follow the legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, a RUSA Sponsored One-Day Facutly Development Programme on “Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Indian Constitution and Indian Society” organised by the Department of Philosophy and P.G. Department of Public Administation held on 20th January, 2016 was a creative and fruitful effort to bring together the scholars and academicians from several disciplines to participate in the deliberations related to the conceptual understanding and insights of the philosophy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.

This paper presents data on the representation of women at 98 philosophy departments in the United States, which were ranked by the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR) in 2015 as well as all of those schools on which data from 2004 exist. The paper makes four points in providing an overview of the state of the field. First, all programs reveal a statistically significant increase in the percentage of women tenured/tenure-track faculty, since 2004. Second, out of the 98 US philosophy departments (...) selected for evaluation by Julie Van Camp in 2004, none in 2015 has 50% women philosophy faculty overall, while one has 50% women who are tenured/tenure track. Third, as of 2015, there is a clear pyramidal shape to the discipline: Women are better represented as Assistant than Associate and as Associate than Full professors. Fourth, women philosophy faculty, especially those who are tenured/tenure track, are better represented at Non-PGR ranked programs than at PGR ranked and PGR Top-20 programs in 2015. (shrink)

Given the sordid history of injustices linking genetics to race and ethnicity, considerations of justice are central to ensuring the responsible development of precision medicine programmes around the world. While considerations of justice may be in tension with other areas of concern, such as scientific value or privacy, there are also tensions between different aspects of justice. This paper focuses on three particular aspects of justice relevant to this precision medicine: social justice, distributive justice and human rights. We describe the (...) implications of each for the use of race and ethnicity in precision medicine, and also how they intersect and potentially conflict with each another. By attending to these intersections, we aim to enrich and add nuance to debates over how best to proceed with precision medicine initiatives. (shrink)

This paper considers the relation between the sources of normativity, reasons, and normative conflicts. It argues that common views about how normative reasons relate to their sources have important consequences for how we can understand putative normative conflicts.

This paper aims to show how Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, namely in the specificity of the Conflict of interpretations category, is a fruitful resource in the constitution of Women's Studies as well as to legitimize the need for its full integration in the canons of humanistic knowledge. In general, they continue to ignore the immense body of knowledge and perspectives that Women's Studies have produced in recent decades. In this sense, it begins by presenting the general features of the hermeneutic (...) problematic and the theme of Conflict of Interpretations, and then showing its proven contribution to the development of Women's Studies and defending its possible contribution to enhancing their integration into canons. (shrink)

Kant is the philosophical tradition's arch-anti-consequentialist – if anyone insists that intentions alone make an action what it is, it is Kant. This chapter takes up Kant's account of the relation between intention and action, aiming both to lay it out and to understand why it might appeal. The chapter first maps out the motivational architecture that Kant attributes to us. We have wills that are organized to action by two parallel and sometimes competing motivational systems. One determines us by (...) way of motives that are sensuous, natural and given from without, the other by motives that are intellectual, rational, and given from within. Each set of motives belongs to a system of laws – natural motives to the laws of nature, rational motives to the laws of freedom. For Kant, all things, including actions, are what they are in virtue of the laws governing them; actions, qua actions, are always governed by laws that govern individual wills. These laws are Kantian maxims, 'or subjective practical laws.' Maxims, for Kant, thus make actions the actions they are. The chapter then maps out the implications of this motivational architecture for Kant's theory of value. Maxims always advert to or 'contain' both ends and means. Ends are always specifications of one of two ultimate ends. Actions have the moral value they have depending on which of two ultimate ends the maxim adverts to. The possibilities are 'happiness,' or gratification of desires with sensuous origins, and 'duty,' or accord with the moral demand to will in ways that respect free rational agency wherever it is found. Only actions aimed at the latter – actions with rational motives – have moral value. Actions aimed at the former – actions with natural motives – though not immoral in themselves, become so when pursuit works against rational motives. For Kant, actions aimed at happiness are ultimately allied with efforts to sustain our 'animal' existence, and so are governed by terms and conditions given by the natural world. Actions aimed at duty, in contrast, are ultimately allied with efforts to impose a rational form on nature, to make it over, so to speak, according to values not given by nature itself. Actions aimed at duty, therefore, create a specifically moral world, one in which mores and norms, formal and informal arrangements, institutions, policies, and so on, realize, harmonize, and promote free rational agency itself. Finally, the chapter addresses motivations for Kant's view. The architecture of will and the theories of action and value he proposes allow Kant to accommodate a host of intuitions and commitments. His view makes room for metaphysically free agency, and for the lived experience of motivational freedom from ever-changing natural desires. It makes room for conflicts within the will while still holding out hope that resolution is possible. It accommodates views that the best human lives engage 'higher' faculties in sustained ways. It identifies a stable, necessary, universal end amidst the evident contingency, pluralism, and instability of most ends. It makes us, and not God or nature, the authors of our moral lives. In the end, Kant's 'anti-consequentialism,' his focus on intentions, is a way of insisting on actions that take their character and value from what should matter most to us, namely individual and collective free rational agency, rather than only and always taking the character of reactive responses to circumstance. (shrink)

The general area of business and professional ethics is full of vexing and confusing problems. For example, questions concerning the im portance of ethical standards, whether ethics is unnecessary given appropriate legal enforcement, whether it is imperative to teach ethical behavior in professional education, and similar questions are all controversial. The specific ethical problems to be found in the areas of accounting and finance are at least as difficult as those in other areas. However, there is one kind of ethical (...) problem which is unusually prominent in finance and accounting, which deserves to be recognized more widely in ethics as a significant kind of issue. This is the problem of conflicts of interest. (shrink)

My topic is Kant’s theory of historical progress. My approach is primarily textual and contextual. I analyse in some detail Kant’s three most important essays on the topic: ‘Idea for a Universal History’, the third part of ‘Theory and Practice’ and the second part of The Conflict of the Faculties. I devote particular attention to the Kant-Herder debate about progress, but also discuss Rousseau, Mendelssohn, Hegel and others. In presenting, on Kant’s behalf, a strong case for his theory (...) of progress, I address the main objections which have been put to it. These are: (i) historical teleology is incoherent (history can’t have a goal because there is no intentional actor functioning at the historical level); (ii) historical teleology undermines morality (if things are getting better anyway, why do I have to try to make them better?); (iii) progress involves ‘chronological unfairness’ (if things are getting better, doesn’t this mean that earlier generations get a raw deal?); (iv) progress consigns the species to ‘spurious infinity’ (isn’t endless improvement endlessly unsatisfactory?); (v) progress amounts to pernicious homogenization (doesn’t the elimination of traditional practices and values impoverish our world?); (vi) the idea of progress is just ‘secularized’ religion (and should be rejected accordingly). In relation to (vi), I consider the Löwith-Blumenberg debate, and draw some general conclusions about the issue of ‘secularization’. In relating these to Kant, I argue for the following position: (a) his theory of progress is more than merely secularized religion; (b) to the extent that it can be described in terms of the secularization thesis, this reflects his ‘critical’ endeavour to rationalize Christianity; (c) in any case, the idea of progress by no means exhausts the rational potential of religion, and so should not be seen as intended to replace the latter. (shrink)

It is true now that man lives in a world of conflict. Conflict is an ever-present process in human relations. Conflict situations indeed appear frequently in daily, public and private life. Conflict may occur within and among families, groups, communities or nations; and they may be fuelled by ethnic, racial, religious, or economic differences, or may arise from differences in ideologies, values and beliefs. Conflict may be on a small or large scale. Conflict charge (...) the people with tensions, threats, fears, anxieties and uncertainties. What makes a society ideal is the extent to which the conflicting interests and needs in a society are constructively managed so that violence does not threaten its continued existence. Since it is obvious that conflicts in any given society is inevitable, management and resolution of conflict is the very essence of talking about conflict. This is what this work is set to achieve and to offer suggestions on how to manage and resolve conflict thereby reducing its negative and destructive effects. This work showed the church has the potential to contribute to the management and resolution of conflicts in Nigeria. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper understands mental attitudes such as emotions and desires to be dispositions to behavior. It also acknowledges that people are often ambivalent, i.e., that they may hold opposed attitudes towards something or someone. Yet the first position seems to entail that ambivalence is either tantamount to paralysis or a contradictory notion. I identify the problem as based on a reductive interpretation of the dispositional character of attitudes and of ambivalence. The paper instead defends a post-Davidsonian view of the (...) basic rationality of human life. By focussing on desire and emotion we can see that the mutually exclusive ways of life involved in ambivalence are manifested in the person’s conduct. (shrink)

Bioethics journals have lagged behind medical and science journals in exploring the threat of conflict of interest (COI) to the integrity of publications. Some recent discussions of COI that have occurred in the bioethics literature are reviewed. Discussions of what has been termed the ?Healy affair? unintentionally demonstrate that the direct and indirect influence of undisclosed COI may come from those who call for protection from the undue influence of industry. Paradoxically, the nature and tone of current discussions may (...) serve to dull sensitivities to what is indeed a serious set of issues facing bioethics. Some proposals are presented to address COI and other challenges to the integrity of bioethics and its journals. COI is too important a topic to be left to ideologues, and there is no substitute for readers' caution and skepticism as tools in dealing with the full range of biases that exist in published papers. (shrink)

This paper examines a largely unrecognized mental disorder that is essentially a disability of values. It is their daily contact with this pathology that leads many university liberal arts faculty to demoralization. The deeply rooted disparity between the world of the traditional liberal arts scholar and today’s college students is not simply a gulf across which communication is difficult, but rather involves a pathological impairment in the majority of students that stems from an exclusionary focus on work, money, and the (...) acquisition of things. It is argued that this state of mind constitutes a self-disabling mental illness, which for a society becomes pathological ideology, and for the individual takes the form of clinical narcissism. (shrink)

According to recent scholarship, Kant’s "An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" and the introductory section to "The Conflict of the Faculties" are masterpieces of philosophical rhetoric. The philosophical significance of these texts lies in establishing the free public use of reason as a tool to discipline political power through pure practical reason, and the rhetorical mastery consists in presenting the free public use of reason as a means to satisfy the ruler’s pragmatic practical reason. Elaborating on (...) this interpretation, I flesh out three further aspects of the writings in question. First, I examine the four types of arguments that Kant crafts in defence of the public use of reason and show how their pragmatic practical character is fully in keeping with the foundation of politics on pure practical ideas. Second, contrasting Kant’s notion of the public use of reason with the classical liberal conception of free speech, I argue that the distinctive character of Kant’s notion of the public use of reason consists in adding to the liberal demand for freedom from state censorship the requirement of the self-discipline of the participants in the public use of reason. Third, I contend that Kant’s notion of the public use of reason goes beyond a mere non-coercive discursive procedure and conclude that, to qualify as public in the distinctive Kantian sense, publicly presented positions must uphold theoretical and moral criteria informed by critical philosophy. (shrink)

This study explored the experiences of the newly-hired faculty in the university to acquire an in-depth and profound understanding of these experiences. It involved eight purposively chosen faculty in a semi-structured interview and focus group discussion documented in voice and video recorders. Using Colaizzi’s seven step-approach to data analysis, results revealed three paradoxical themes: the joys and struggles of teaching, successes and pains of learning, and the privileges and challenges of serving. On the one hand, the joys and struggles of (...) teaching were brought about by their adjustments in instruction. On the other hand, successes and pains of learning centered on professional growth. Finally, the privileges and challenges of serving incorporated the experiences in research, production, and extension. Generally, these teachers have experienced ups and downs in their first two years of teaching at a higher education institution. On the basis of study findings, implications and recommendations are discussed. (shrink)

The thesis contains my early work arguing against evidentialism for reasons for belief (chapter 1), my early argument that rationality is not normative (chapter 2), an argument that rationality is not responding reasons, at least understood in one way (chapter 2), a general discussion of how normative conflicts might (appear to) arise in many different ways (chapter 3), a discussion of how to weigh pragmatic and evidential reasons for belief (chapter 4), and a discussion of the general structure of normativity (...) and its ramifications for understanding putative normative conflicts (chapter 4). At a more general level, the thesis aims to explore how putative normative conflicts might arise and whether they are genuine conflicts or only apparent. It also offers a defence of the view that there are genuine state-given reasons for propositional attitudes, including pragmatic reasons for belief. (shrink)

There is a difficulty in understanding Nietzsche’s epistemology. It is generally accepted that he endorses the naturalized epistemological view that knowledge should be closely connected to the sciences. He also holds the evolutionary epistemological position that knowledge has developed exclusively to benefit human survival. Nietzsche’s evolutionary epistemology, however, appears to imply a debunking argument about the truth of our beliefs that seems to undermine his commitment to a naturalized epistemology. This paper argues that Nietzsche’s evolutionary epistemology does not, in fact, (...) undermine his naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

This synthesis of 5 prominent conflict management paradigms uses power differential as the single most contributing variable to their process and outcome of conflict. Efforts of scholars to integrate or synthesize conflict paradigms have been unsuccessful or clumsy by the scholars’ own assessments. The 5 selected paradigms represent an interdisciplinary set of normative and descriptive paradigms from different social contexts and intellectual frameworks. The 5 share the common traits of rival goals, three levels of socially constructed power (...) differential, and outcomes relative to the total value of the rival goal. An inverse relationship between power differential and the total value of conflict outcomes is supported by all 5 paradigms and empirical data. Explanatory metatheory is the methodology used for synthesis. An increase in power differential results in a decrease in total value of the rival goal. Power differential is constructed using Max Weber’s ideal-type method. The power differentials are abstracted from the paradigms themselves. Empirical work form secondary sources and case studies complete the analysis. (shrink)

Introduction: Anatomy education known as being among the most significant components of medical education exists in the first and second semester lecture contents of medicine faculties. The considering of medicine faculty students viewpoints about anatomy education is important for improving anatomy education and teaching methods. In addition, the evaluation of interest and awareness of students to anatomy in postgraduate specialization preferences provides to predict researcher number which will be study in this area. -/- Materials and Methods: In this study, (...) it was proposed to evaluate the opinions of medicine faculty students about anatomy education and the view points and the awareness to anatomy in postgraduate specialization education. This study was performed on Gaziantep University second and third year medicine faculty students (n= 340). The data were obtained by feedback method with a questionnaire which consist of 30 question. -/- Results: It was found that the students chiefly benefited from lecture notes while they have been studied to theoretical and practical part of the anatomy individually. No significant correlation was found among general average grade and lengths of anatomy study of students (r= 0.097, p= 0.074). Fifty percent (%50) of students thought that don’t use of cadaver is always a deficiency in anatomy education. It was seen that the postgraduate career preferences of the students of 39.4% was internal medicine departments. The rate of students desiring the postgraduate anatomy specialization education was 1.2%. -/- Conclusion: In conclusion, the achieved results may will be beneficial for improving the new educational strategies related anatomy, resolving the present deficiencies and increasing the tendency to postgraduate anatomy education. (shrink)

For those familiar with Machiavelli’s texts, Foucault’s interpretation of Macchiavelli in his 1978 lecture series Sécurité, Territoire, Population1 is surprising. Although Machiavelli figures prominently in five of the thirteen lectures,2 Foucault treats Machiavelli as if he were the author of only one book—The Prince—and his reading treats this complex text as if it covered only one topic: how to guarantee the security of the Prince. Clearly Foucault did not intend his interpretation of Machiavelli as a close exegesis. Other discussions of (...) Foucault’s treatment of Machiavelli have acknowledged the role Machiavelli plays in these lectures and even note the inadequacy of the interpretation given by Foucault, but most commentators do not pursue Foucault’s reading further.3 This investigation is not concerned with whether Foucault got Machiavelli right. Rather, Foucault’s reading of Machiavelli is noteworthy because it is partial and incomplete in a way reminiscent of Foucault’s reading of Hobbes in, Il faut défendre la société. This fragmentary character of Foucault’s inscription of Machiavelli as a forerunner of the history of biopolitique allows an innovative reading of the Florentine that connects Machiavelli’s thinking, however indirectly, on a trajectory that encounters, for instance, Foucault’s analysis of populations, the police state, and even his reading of liberalism during the 1978-­‐ 1979 lectures. My argument here is that the specific way Foucault’s inscribes Machiavelli in the history of gouvernementalité, while seeming to reject him, in fact acts to resuscitate, and thereby relay, a reading of Machiavelli as a thinker who articulates encounters among political practices engaged within a horizon of radical immanence. (shrink)

In the midst of the De pace fidei’s imagined heavenly conference on the theme of the possibility of religious harmony, Nicholas of Cusa has Saint Peter acknowledge to the Persian interlocutor that it will be difficult to bring Jews to the acceptance of Christ’s divine nature because they refuse to accept the implicit meaning of their own history of revelation. What is peculiar about this line in the dialogue is not merely that it flies in the face of what Cusanus (...) scholars tend to regard as an ecumenical spirit in Nicholas’ call to interreligious dialogue and mutual toleration. Rather, the statement reveals a peculiar hermeneutic principle at work in Nicholas’ understanding of the tension between truth and doctrine and the way that this tension informs human practice. Accordingly, by grappling with Nicholas’ portrayal of an imagined failure of Jews to practice interpretation correctly, I hope to shed light on Nicholas’ philosophy of religion in a way that neither ignores his anti-Judaism nor reduces the significance of his views to one of its most unpleasant manifestations. (shrink)

The evolution of altruism in human societies has been intensively investigated in social and natural sciences. A widely acknowledged recent idea is the “parochial altruism model,” which suggests that inter- group hostility and intragroup altruism can coevolve through lethal intergroup conflicts. The current article critically examines this idea by reviewing research relevant to intergroup conflicts in human evolutionary history from evolutionary biology, psychology, cultural anthropology, and archaeology. After a brief intro- duction, section 2 illustrates the mathematical model of parochial altruism (...) and some critiques of the model and its interpretation, primarily from an evolutionary biology point of view. Section 3 delves into the archaeological evidence of prehistoric intergroup conflicts in the Japanese archipelago’s Jomon and Yayoi periods, Europe’s Mesolithic period, and North America’s Pacific period as counter examples of the paro- chial altruism model. In section 4, the ethnographies of intergroup relationships and conflicts reveal that intergroup relationships in many ethnic groups are not as simple as the assumption in the mathematical model of parochial altruism. In section 5, we outline psychological research on intergroup conflicts which suggest that intergroup hostility and ingroup altruism are not necessarily correlated. In conclusion, we argue that the assumption and parameter settings of the parochial altruism model are inconsistent with empirical data. (shrink)

A challenge we face in a world that has been shaped by, and continues to be shaped by, racist attitudes and institutions is that the evidence is often stacked in favor of racist beliefs. As a result, we may find ourselves facing the following conflict: what if the evidence we have supports something we morally shouldn’t believe? For example, it is morally wrong to assume, solely on the basis of someone’s skin color, that they’re a staff member. But, what (...) if you’re in a context where, because of historical patterns of discrimination, someone’s skin color is a very good indicator that they’re a staff member? When this sort of normative conflict looms, a conflict between moral considerations on the one hand and what you epistemically ought to believe given the evidence on the other, what should we do? It might be unfair to assume that they’re a staff member, but to ignore the evidence would mean risking inaccurate beliefs. Some, notably Tamar Gendler (2011), have suggested that we simply face a tragic irresolvable dilemma. In this chapter, I consider how these cases of conflict arise and I canvass the viability of suggested resolutions of the conflict. In the end, I argue that there’s actually no conflict here. Moral considerations can change how we epistemically should respond to the evidence. (shrink)

This essay is titled "Critique the Postulation of the Historical Law Theory and relate it to African Law. The postulation of the historical law school that law emanates from customs through an ordered pattern of systematized progress into a codified system in relation to African law forms the crust of this essay. To achieve this task, this essay adopts a critical method in exposing c postulation of the historical law school and the African Law (keeping in mind the Ukelle communal (...) Law System). This essay questions whether there can be an independent law made or promulgated without targeting a given people or that there can be a people-free law? This essay claims that like the historical law school, laws emanate from their ground norms but insists that unlike the historical law school, laws in Ukelle Traditional System do not necessarily have to submit to through the rigor of systematic and strict evolutionary pattern of progress. Like Herder, this essay avers that there is a unique character with each culture, and as such Ukelle Traditional Law does not have to submit to any universal character of law. (shrink)

The article works out the thesis that to the excessive desire of the powerful for the absolute appropriation/domination it is opposed a not less excessive and absolute desire from people in order not to be appropriated/dominated: two desires of a distinct nature which are neither the desire for the same things nor the desire for different things, but desires in which the act of desiring is different. Taking into account that each desire aims at its absolute effectiveness, each one of (...) them tries to impose itself universally becoming doubly absolute: for one side it is inclined to the absolute domination (the powerful) or to the plain liberty (the people); for the other side, tries to impose itself to the whole political body. Each desire is only sustained by its heterogeneous desire. Each one pursues its own purposes whose realization will be the ruin of all collective life. Good institutions and good laws ensure liberty as long as they are capable to prevent the powerful or the people to consummate its desire or abandon its own desire to assume the other’s. However, having inscribed the order of law in the disorder of dissent, Machiavelli discarded the idea of an institutional order as a defi nitive solution to the disorder of dissent. Consequently, no law or institution is able to defi nitively resist the risk of corruption. This requires a periodic return to the origins: the experience of the constitutive moment of the original violence which, exposing men to risks, restores the initial reputation and strength of States and institutions. -/- O artigo parte da enunciação da tese de que ao desejo desmesurado dos grandes pela apropriação/dominação absoluta opõe-se um desejo não menos desmesurado e absoluto do povo de não sê-lo: dois desejos de natureza diferente que não são nem o desejo das mesmas coisas nem desejo de coisas diferentes, mas desejos cujo ato de desejar é diferente. Considerando que cada desejo visa sua efetividade absoluta, cada um tenta se impor universalmente tornando-se duplamente absoluto: por um lado, tende à dominação total (os grandes) ou à liberdade plena (o povo); por outro, tenta se impor ao conjunto do corpo político. Cada desejo somente se sustenta do desejo que lhe é heterogêneo. Cada um persegue uma fi nalidade própria cuja realização plena será a ruína de toda vida coletiva. Boas instituições e boas leis asseguram a liberdade na medida em que forem capazes de impedir que grandes ou povo consumam seu desejo ou que abandonem seu desejo próprio para assumir o do outro. Contudo, ao inscrever a ordem da lei na desordem dos dissensos, Maquiavel descartou a ideia de uma ordem institucional como solução defi nitiva da desordem dos dissensos. Consequentemente, nenhuma lei ou instituição é capaz de resistir defi nitivamente ao risco da corrupção. Isso obriga ao retorno periódico às origens: a experiência do momento constitutivo da violência originária que, expondo os homens ao risco, restaura o prestígio e vigor iniciais de Estados e instituições. (shrink)

The case study presented by Winch and Sinnott (2011) shows not only how difficult it is for clinicians and researchers to identify conflicts of interest (COI), but also how damaging it can be when there are unin- formed and uncoordinated policy responses by senior administrators.

In this paper a Knowledge-Based System (KBS) for determining the appropriate students major according to his/her preferences for sophomore student enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology in Al-Azhar University of Gaza was developed and tested. A set of predefined criterions that is taken into consideration before a sophomore student can select a major is outlined. Such criterion as high school score, score of subject such as Math I, Math II, Electrical Circuit I, and Electronics I taken during (...) the student freshman year, number of credits passed, student cumulative grade point average of freshman year, among others, were then used as input data to KBS. KBS was designed and developed using Simpler Level Five (SL5) Object expert system language. KBS was tested on three generation of sophomore students from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology of the Al-Azhar University, Gaza. The results of the evaluation show that the KBS is able to correctly determine the appropriate students major without errors. (shrink)

This paper analyzes ethical issues relating to lawyer mobility.

Vardoulakis explores what Balibar means by designating transindividuality as ‘quasi-transcendental.’ He does so by turning to Balibar’s readings of Part IV of Spinoza’s Ethics, the Part that is central to Balibar’s understanding of the transindividual in Spinoza. Vardoulakis shows that the quasi-transcendental in Spinoza can only be a form of agonistic relations if his political theory in the Theological Political Treatise is to account for political change.

In this essay, I use four war movies to explore conflicts of loyalty and how they are resolved, all to illustrate W.D. Ross’ multiple rule deontologism. The films are all fine WWII movies: The Enemy Below; Decision Before Dawn; John Rabe; and The Bridge on the River Kwai. In my analysis of each, I show how the protagonists face conflicts of their loyalty to themselves, their countrymen, their friends, and humanity in general, and resolve them in the face of changing (...) factual backgrounds. (shrink)

A study of the psychology of demoralization affecting university faculty in the liberal arts. This form of demoralization is not adequately understood in terms of the concept of career burnout. Instead, demoralization that affects university faculty in the liberal arts requires a broadened understanding of the historical and psychological situation in which these professors find themselves today.

Conceptual engineers endeavor to improve our concepts. But their endeavors face serious practical difficulties. One such difficulty – rational conceptual conflict - concerns the degree to which agents are incentivized to impede the efforts of conceptual engineers, especially in many of the contexts within which conceptual engineering is viewed as a worthwhile pursuit. Under such conditions, the already difficult task of conceptual engineering becomes even more difficult. Consequently, if they want to increase their chances of success, conceptual engineers should (...) pay closer attention to – and devise strategies to mitigate – rational conceptual conflict. After outlining the phenomenon at greater length and mapping its connections to other similar practical problems (Section 1), I explore the dynamics of such conflict by way of several detailed case studies (Section 2). In particular, I focus on cases driven by material, social, and moral incentives. I then consider some important methodological implications of rational conceptual conflict (Section 3). Among other things, I argue that conceptual engineers should focus more heavily on cultivating settings that modify the payoffs and penalties associated with conceptual conflict. By such indirect means, they can incentivize conceptual cooperation rather than conflict, thus making it easier to achieve success in conceptual engineering. Section 4 concludes. (shrink)