Philosophy of Anti-Slavery
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Augustine on Knowledge
Augustine on Knowledge Divine Illumination as an Argument Against Scepticism ANITA VAN DER BOS RMA: RELIGION & CULTURE Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Research Master Thesis s2217473, April 2017 FIRST SUPERVISOR: dr. M. Van Dijk SECOND SUPERVISOR: dr. dr. F.L. Roig Lanzillotta 1 2 Content Augustine on Knowledge ........................................................................................................................ 1 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................ 4 Preface .................................................................................................................................................... 5 Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 7 The life of Saint Augustine ................................................................................................................... 9 The influence of the Contra Academicos .......................................................................................... 13 Note on the quotations ........................................................................................................................ 14 1. Scepticism ........................................................................................................................................ -
Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum, Book Five
Binghamton University The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB) The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter 12-1986 The Lives of the Peripatetics: Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum, Book Five Michael Sollenberger Mount St. Mary's University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://orb.binghamton.edu/sagp Part of the Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons, Ancient Philosophy Commons, and the History of Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Sollenberger, Michael, "The Lives of the Peripatetics: Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosophorum, Book Five" (1986). The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter. 129. https://orb.binghamton.edu/sagp/129 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB). It has been accepted for inclusion in The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter by an authorized administrator of The Open Repository @ Binghamton (The ORB). For more information, please contact [email protected]. f\îc|*zx,e| lîâ& The Lives of the Peripatetics: Diogenes Laertius, Vitae Philosoohorum Book Five The biographies of six early Peripatetic philosophers are con tained in the fifth book of Diogenes Laertius* Vitae philosoohorum: the lives of the first four heads of the sect - Aristotle, Theophras tus, Strato, and Lyco - and those of two outstanding members of the school - Demetrius of Phalerum and Heraclides of Pontus, For the history of two rival schools, the Academy and the Stoa, we are for tunate in having not only Diogenes' versions in 3ooks Four and Seven, but also the Index Academicorum and the Index Stoicorum preserved among the papyri from Herculaneum, But for the Peripatos there-is no such second source. -
Examining the Philosophical Inconsistencies of Libertarian Paternalism
Munich Personal RePEc Archive The Curious Case of Choice Architect: Examining the Philosophical Inconsistencies of Libertarian Paternalism Kuriakose, Francis and Kylasam Iyer, Deepa Erasmus University Rotterdam, University of Cambridge 24 April 2017 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/84842/ MPRA Paper No. 84842, posted 06 Nov 2019 16:37 UTC The Curious Case of Choice Architect: Examining the Philosophical Inconsistencies of Libertarian Paternalism Francis Kuriakose and Deepa Kylasam Iyer April 2017 Abstract Classical economics works on the principle that individuals are rational and make decisions to maximize their self interest. However in real situations, individuals face a conflict between rational and irrational selves leading to decision making that does not leave them better off. Libertarian paternalism proposes a solution to this rationality problem in an individual by conceiving a choice architect. Choice architect is a third party capable of arriving at what a perfectly rational choice would be and ‘nudges’ an individual towards making that choice. Libertarian paternalists claim that choice architect does not interfere with the freedom of an individual because the choices he offers are easily reversible, i.e, an individual can reject it at any given point in time. Libertarian Paternalism seems to offer the third way between absolute autonomy of individual choice (libertarianism) and third party intervention (paternalism). This paper argues that the conception of a choice architect comes out of a hasty commitment to reconciling libertarianism and paternalism by placing perfect rationality and autonomy in two separate individuals in the case of a single decision making process. The paper proposes alternatives to confront the rationality problem. -
The Dial and Transcendentalist Music Criticism” by WESLEY T
The ‘yearnings of the heart to the Infinite’: The Dial and Transcendentalist Music Criticism” by WESLEY T. MOTT “When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky . and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.” So wrote contrary Henry Thoreau in “Walden” (1854; [Princeton UP, 1971], p. 159). His literary acquaintances, in fact, had made important contributions to the emergence of music criticism in Boston a decade earlier in the Transcendentalist periodical, the Dial. Published from 1840 to 1844 and edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Dial promised readers in the first issue to give voice to a “new spirit” and to “new views and the dreams of youth,” to aid “the progress of a revolution . united only in a common love of truth, and love of its work” (the Dial, 4 vols. [rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961], 1:1-2. The definitive study is Joel Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the Dial: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors [Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1980]). Featuring poetry, essays, reviews, and translations on an eclectic range of literary, philosophical, theological, and aesthetic topics, the Dial published only four articles substantially about music: one by John Sullivan Dwight, one by John Francis Tuckerman, and two by Fuller (excluding her lengthy study Romaic and Rhine Ballads [3:137-80] and brief commentary scattered in review articles). Each wrote one installment of an annual Dial feature for 1840-42—a review of the previous winter’s concerts in Boston. -
DIOGENES of SINOPE Diogenes of Sinope (C
DIOGENES OF SINOPE Diogenes of Sinope (c. 412‐323 BC), a contemporary of Plato and Aristotle, is considered the founder of the philosophical school of Cynicism. Concerned more with action than with words, he left no writings. What we know of his thought is what has been related to us by contempo‐ raries and later scholars. The most extensive account is from Diogenes Laertes, writing almost 500 years after Diogenes lived. LIFE OF DIOGENES OF SINOPE, THE CYNIC (404‐323 BC) RD BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS (3 CENTURY AD) Diogenes was a native of Sinope, son of Hicesius, a banker. Diocles relates that he went into exile because his father was entrusted with the money of the state and adulterated the coin‐ age. But Eubulides in his book on Diogenes says that Diogenes himself did this and was forced to leave home along with his father. Moreover Diogenes himself actually confesses in his Porde‐ lus that he adulterated the coinage. Some say that having been appointed to superintend the workmen he was persuaded by them, and that he went to Delphi or to the Delian oracle in his own city and inquired of Apollo whether he should do what he was urged to do. When the god gave him permission to alter the political currency, not understanding what this meant, he adulterated the state coinage, and when he was detected, according to some he was banished, while according to others he voluntarily quitted the city for fear of consequences. One version is that his father entrusted him with the money and that he debased it, in consequence of which the father was imprisoned and died, while the son fled, came to Delphi, and inquired, not whether he should falsify the coinage, but what he should do to gain the greatest reputation; and that then it was that he received the oracle. -
Jeremy Bentham, Liberalism and the Science of International
Faculty of Law Victoria University of Wellington Foundations on Silt: Jeremy Bentham, Liberalism and the Science of International Law Research Paper History and Theory of International Law (LAWS 540) Robert Deuchars 1 Contents 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 3 2. BENTHAM VS BLACKSTONE ........................................................................................ 5 3. INTERNATIONAL LAW AND THE PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY ................................. 8 4. THE CODIFICATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW .................................................. 15 5. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................... 19 Word count: 7,522 (excluding footnotes). 2 1. Introduction When the words good or bad are uttered the user generally takes their meaning derived from a system of ethics or morals. In this sense good and bad are particularist in nature and also socio-culturally specific. Let us take a simple example from Antiquity. At school in the West we learn of a figure called Alexander the Great, the Macedonian. By all accounts we are taught that he was a great, and by extension a good man. In modern day Iran Alexander of Macedonia is known as Alexander the Devil. So the question arises: was Alexander good or bad , or both? Is it possible to state unequivocally that the actions of Alexander were as a matter of fact morally good or morally bad ? I think the answer to this question is fairly straightforward: it depends. Now this answer is not a simple descent into postmodern territory and moral relativism; there are genuine and empirical reasons to believe all three possibilities pertaining to the actions of Alexander. In short it is not possible to extrapolate from the particular to the general and it is not a question of semantics or even of critical hermeneutics. -
The Rise of Liberal Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill Piers Norris
The Rise of Liberal Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill Piers Norris Turner, Ohio State University [DRAFT: final version forthcoming in The Blackwell Companion to 19th Century Philosophy, ed. J.A. Shand] I. Introduction By the turn of the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a well-known moral and legal reformer. A child of the Enlightenment, writing at the time of the American and French revolutions, Bentham had offered wide-ranging critiques of customary institutions and ways of thinking. He was particularly critical of appeals to natural law and intuition that, consciously or not, provided mere cover stories for people’s preferences. Such appeals, he argued, fail to provide real reasons: The various systems that have been formed concerning the standard of right and wrong… consist all of them in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept of the author’s sentiment or opinion as a reason in itself. (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation [IPML], II.14; B i.8)1 Because these cover stories are guided by people’s preferences, Bentham also argued that they are incapable of grounding a principled and well-organized set of public institutions. They instead protect established powers, whose likes and dislikes carry the most weight. His earliest writings, for instance, detail how the vagaries of the common law served entrenched interests rather than the public at large. What Bentham needed was a public principle that could guide a scientific program of legal codification and political reform. -
HUME and MILL on "UTILITY of RELIGION": a BORGEAN GARDEN of FORKING PATHS?L
TEAO~ Reuista Iberoamericana de Estudios Utilitaristas-2005, XlVII: 117-129 ISSN 1132-0877 HUME AND MILL ON "UTILITY OF RELIGION": A BORGEAN GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS?l JOSE L. TASSET2 University ofA Coruiia ABSTRACT This work is not a specific assessment of Utility ofReligion by John Stuart Mill, but a defence of what I think is a utilitarian, but not millian, view on the problem that work states, the question of the utility of religion in contemporary societies. I construct that view from neohumeanism more than from millian positions, notwithstanding, I postulate that view as a genuine utilitarian one. Every cultural tradition makes a different approach to ethical and political theories. Spanish and Ibero-American utilitarians make precisely it with Clas sical Utilitarianism. From that point of view, Ibero-American people identifies utilitarianism with radical and enlightened tradition linked with the reform that through XVIIIth and XIXth centuries tried to undermine the foundations of conservative society in our nations. This aim was not achieved, at least not completely; because of that, the pursuit of Utilitarianism remains opened between us. In the end,I will argue that Spanish and Ibero-American utilitarians connect utilitarianism with philosophical and political radicalism, and inside that His panic utilitarianism, plays an important role the criticism of social and political functions of Religion. Maybe, part of the future of Utilitarianism in our cultural context depends on a return of the Theory to its radical roots, also in religious subjects. Keywords: J ohn Stuart Mill, David Hume, Jorge Luis Borges, religion, deism, theism, functionalism, truth. RESUMEN Este trabajo no pretende ser una evaluaci6n especifica de la Utilidad de la Religi6n de John Stuart Mill, sino una defensa de 10 que creo es una posici6n 1 Date of acceptance: 26/07/2006. -
Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1820-1872
lil p lip m mi: Ealpi) ^alUa emeraum* COMPLETE WORKS. Centenary EdittOH. 12 vols., crown 8vo. With Portraits, and copious notes by Ed- ward Waldo Emerson. Price per volume, $1.75. 1. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. 3. Essays : First Series. 3. Essays : Second Series. 4. Representative Men. 5. English Traits. 6. Conduct of Life. 7. Society and Solitude. 8. Letters and Social Aims. 9. Poems, xo. Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 11. Miscellanies. 13. Natural History of Intellect, and other Papers. With a General Index to Emerson's Collected Works. Riverside Edition. With 2 Portraits. la vols., each, i2mo. gilt top, $1.75; the set, $31.00. Little Classic Edition. 13 vols. , in arrangement and coo- tents identical with Riverside Edition, except that vol. la is without index. Each, i8mo, $1.25 ; the set, $15 00. POEMS. Household Edition. With Portrait. lamo, $1.50} full gilt, $2.00. ESSAYS. First and Second Series. In Cambridge Classics. Crown 8vo, $1.00. NATURE, LECTURES, AND ADDRESSES, together with REPRESENTATIVE MEN. In Cambridge Classics. Crown 8vo, f i.oo. PARNASSUS. A collection of Poetry edited by Mr. Emer- son., Introductory Essay. Hoitsekold Edition. i2mo, 1^1.50, Holiday Edition. Svo, $3.00. EMERSON BIRTHDAY BOOK. With Portrait and Illus- trations. i8mo, $1.00. EMERSON CALENDAR BOOK. 32mo, parchment-paper, 35 cents. CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON. 834-1872. Edited by Charles Eliot Norton. 2 ols. crown Svo, gilt top, $4.00. Library Edition. 2 vols. i2mo, gilt top, S3.00. CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN STERLING AND EMER- SON. Edited, with a sketch of Sterling's life, by Ed- ward Waldo Emerson. -
The Happiness Philosophers
© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Introduction A philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character. — William James But even as we as a nation have embraced education as critical to economic growth and opportunity, we should remember that colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility. Unlike perhaps any other institutions in the world, they embrace the long view and nurture the kind of critical perspectives that look far beyond the present. — dreW Gilpin faUsT, presidenT of harvard UniversiTy The Word “UTiliTarian” is not apt to strike the right chord in the world’s moral consciousness. Today, as in the nineteenth century, it can all too easily conjure up visions of soulless manager drones addicted to “efficient” adminis- tration in the least imaginative and most dehumanizing sense, or of those who would destroy a many-sided liberal education in the name of the immediately practical, useful, and vocational. The defenders of the humanities, including the presidents of Harvard and Columbia and their peers, have tended to define themselves by their opposition to instrumental or “utilitarian” approaches to education, which, it is implied, will prioritize “economic growth and opportu- nity” and miss the big issue: how over the long haul to cultivate individuals who can think critically, empathize with others, imagine better worlds, and actively engage in meaningful democratic citizenship. These, in their view, are the invaluable intangibles that cost-bene fit-minded, bean-counting, Dicken- sian utilitarian functionaries cannot even conceptualize much less defend. -
Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable, Natural Rights
Critique of the Doctrine of Inalienable, Natural Rights JEREMY BENTHAM From Jeremy Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies, vol. 2 of Bowring (ed.), Works, 1843. PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS The Declaration of Rights -- I mean the paper published under that name by the French National Assembly in 1791 -- assumes for its subject-matter a field of disquisition as unbounded in point of extent as it is important in its nature. But the more ample the extent given to any proposition or string of propositions, the more difficult it is to keep the import of it confined without deviation, within the bounds of truth and reason. If in the smallest corners of the field it ranges over, it fail of coinciding with the line of rigid rectitude, no sooner is the aberration pointed out, than (inasmuch as there is no medium between truth and falsehood) its pretensions to the appellation of truism are gone, and whoever looks upon it must recognise it to be false and erroneous, -- and if, as here, political conduct be the theme, so far as the error extends and fails of being detected, pernicious. In a work of such extreme importance with a view to practice, and which Throughout keeps practice so closely and immediately and professedly in view, a single error may be attended with the most fatal consequences. The more extensive the propositions, the more consummate will be the knowledge, the more exquisite the skill, indispensably requisite to confine them in all points within the pale of truth. The most consummate ability in the whole nation could not have been too much for the task -- one may venture to say, it would not have been equal to it. -
Tracing Confucianism in Contemporary China
TRACING CONFUCIANISM IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA Ruichang Wang and Ruiping Fan Abstract: With the reform and opening policy implemented by the Chinese government since the late 1970s, mainland China has witnessed a sustained resurgence of Confucianism first in academic studies and then in social practices. This essay traces the development of this resurgence and demonstrates how the essential elements and authentic moral and intellectual resources of long-standing Confucian culture have been recovered in scholarly concerns, ordinary ideas, and everyday life activities. We first introduce how the Modern New Confucianism reappeared in mainland China in the three groups of the Chinese scholars in the Confucian studies in the 1980s and early 1990s. Then we describe how a group of innovative mainland Confucian thinkers has since the mid-1990s come of age launching new versions of Confucian thought differing from that of the overseas New Confucians and their forefathers, followed by our summary of public Confucian pursuits and activities in the mainland society in the recent decade. Finally, we provide a few concluding remarks about the difficulties encountered in the Confucian development and our general expectations for future. 1 Introduction Confucianism is not just a philosophical doctrine constructed by Confucius (551- 479BCE) and developed by his followers. It is more like a religion in the general sense. In fact, Confucius took himself as a cultural transmitter rather than a creator (cf. Analects 7.1, 7.20), inheriting the Sinic culture that had long existed before him.2 Dr. RUICHANG WANG, Professor, School of Culture & Communications, Capital university of Economics and Business. Emai: [email protected].