Between Relativism and Design: The Limits of Hume's Secularity

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Roger Maioli

Challenging the common image of Hume as a thoroughly secular philosopher, I argue that Hume occasionally relied on the design argument to defend the objectivity of values. Hume acknowledged that rejecting design might open the door to aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic relativism. To avoid this prospect, he allowed himself to repurpose the language of providential naturalists like Hutcheson and claim that “nature,” rather than God, has attuned our faculties to objective standards of morals, beauty, and truth. Historians of philosophy have treated such passages as merely figurative, as they conflict with fundamental principles in Hume's philosophy. I argue instead, from an intellectual historical perspective, that Hume nonetheless expects the passages to be read literally, since only the literal reading helps his case against relativism. Rather than recasting Hume as a defender of design, however, I argue that his appeals to design were less an integral part of his philosophy than a provisional compromise, a response to intractable tensions in the history of secularism.

PMLA ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 115 (7) ◽  
pp. 1855-1855
Author(s):  
Albert C. Baugh

Some of the writers whose remarks I have quoted may belong to the school often referred to as the New Critics. At any rate, if we can trust their frequently expressed disapproval of current scholarship, the New Critics would not disagree with those remarks. I do not wish to be intolerant of those whose intolerance I deprecate. There is more than one fruitful approach to a work of literature, and while some of the New Criticism seems to me to be quite sterile I am ready to welcome any method of interpretation which leads to the fuller understanding and enjoyment of a work of literature. What I am not willing to admit is that the New Criticism is the only true source of illumination. Behind the poem is the poet, and whatever in his own life or in the life of his time helps us to understand the man helps us to understand his work. Literary history is a frame which enhances the work of art, or, if I may change the figure, a means of displaying it, a setting which permits us to view it in proper perspective. Without it we should be like the historian who would interpret Magna Carta or the Declaration of Independence without reference to the conditions which called these documents into being. Besides this, literary history as a part of the history of man is as legitimate an object of interest and as worthy of study as political or economic history, or the history of science or art. And the history of literature has been made possible only by the patient labors of scholars who have quarried and shaped the stone out of which the edifice has been built. We need criticism and we need the historical perspective which investigation makes possible. Let us seek for a fruitful union of the two without disparaging the share which each contributes to the common end.


Africa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 552-570
Author(s):  
Stan Frankland

ABSTRACTThe Pygmy mimic is an extremely persistent colonial trope that continues to inform contemporary anthropological understandings of Africa's Pygmy populations. Mimicry is now understood as being a key component of the social reproduction of a distinct Pygmy way of being. In this paper I examine the historical accounts of mimicry and try to bring a historical perspective to bear on contemporary ethnographic accounts of its practice. I also set my own research among the Sua Pygmies of Uganda against these other examples. The intention behind this is to acknowledge the common humanity of Africa's Pygmies and to create new grounds of comparison – such as a shared history of oppression – that are not dependent on a unique foraging mode of thought.


Author(s):  
Alexey G. Zhavoronkov

The article presents the largely neglected ‘alternative’ history of the philosophical notion of exception, from Ancient Rome till the late 19th century, illustrated by Cicero, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. While arguing against the common narrow view on exceptions as a political concept (following Carl Schmitt and others), the analysis lays out the much-needed historical foundation for a potential broad theory of exception, still notoriously absent in modern practical philosophy. The main goal is to demonstrate that in the history of philosophy the discussion concerning exceptions was not limited to philosophy of law, encompassing many other fields like epistemology, ethics, anthropology, social and political philosophy


2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Donald Finan ◽  
Stephen M. Tasko

The history of speech-language pathology as a profession encompasses a tradition of knowledge generation. In recent years, the quantity of speech science research and the presence of speech scientists within the domain of the American Speech-Hearing-Language Association (ASHA) has diminished, even as ASHA membership and the size of the ASHA Convention have grown dramatically. The professional discipline of speech science has become increasingly fragmented, yet speech science coursework is an integral part of the mandated curriculum. Establishing an active, vibrant community structure will serve to aid researchers, educators, and clinicians as they work in the common area of speech science.


2004 ◽  
pp. 142-157
Author(s):  
M. Voeikov ◽  
S. Dzarasov

The paper written in the light of 125th birth anniversary of L. Trotsky analyzes the life and ideas of one of the most prominent figures in the Russian history of the 20th century. He was one of the leaders of the Russian revolution in its Bolshevik period, worked with V. Lenin and played a significant role in the Civil War. Rejected by the party bureaucracy L. Trotsky led uncompromising struggle against Stalinism, defending his own understanding of the revolutionary ideals. The authors try to explain these events in historical perspective, avoiding biases of both Stalinism and anticommunism.


Somatechnics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mel Y. Chen

In this paper I would like to bring into historical perspective the interrelation of several notions such as race and disability, which at the present moment seem to risk, especially in the fixing language of diversity, being institutionalised as orthogonal in nature to one another rather than co-constitutive. I bring these notions into historical clarity primarily through the early history of what is today known as Down Syndrome or Trisomy 21, but in 1866 was given the name ‘mongoloid idiocy’ by English physician John Langdon Down. In order to examine the complexity of these notions, I explore the idea of ‘slow’ populations in development, the idea of a material(ist) constitution of a living being, the ‘fit’ or aptness of environmental biochemistries broadly construed, and, finally, the germinal interarticulation of race and disability – an ensemble that continues to commutatively enflesh each of these notions in their turn.


Author(s):  
Mauro Rocha Baptista

Neste artigo analisamos a relação do Ensino Religioso com a sua evolução ao longo do contexto recente do Brasil para compreender a posição do Supremo Tribunal Federal ao considerar a possibilidade do Ensino Religioso confessional. Inicialmente apresentaremos a perspectiva legislativa criada com a constituição de 1988 e seus desdobramentos nas indicações curriculares. Neste contexto é frisado a intenção de incluir o Ensino Religioso na Base Nacional Curricular Comum, o que acabou não acontecendo. A tendência manifesta nas duas primeiras versões da BNCC era de um Ensino Religioso não-confessional. Uma tendência que demarcava a função do Ensino Religioso em debater a religião, mas que não permitia o direcionamento por uma vertente religioso qualquer. Esta posição se mostrava uma evolução da primeira perspectiva histórica mais associada à catequese confessional. Assim como também ultrapassava a interpretação posterior de um ecumenismo interconfessional, que mantinha a superioridade do cristianismo ante as demais religiões. Sendo assim, neste artigo, adotaremos o argumento de que a decisão do STF, de seis votos contra cinco, acaba retrocedendo ante o que nos parecia um caminho muito mais frutífero.Palavras-chave: Ensino Religioso. Supremo Tribunal Federal. Confessional. Interconfessional. Não-confessional.Abstract: On this article, we analyze the relation between Religious education and its evolution along the currently Brazilian context in order to understand the position of the Supreme Court in considering the possibility of a confessional Religious education. Firstly, we are going to present the legislative perspective created with the 1988 Federal Constitution and its impacts in the curricular lines. On this context it was highlighted the intention to include the Religious Education on the Common Core National Curriculum (CCNC), which did not really happened. The tendency manifested in the first two versions of the CCNC was of a non-confessional Religious Education. A tendency that delineated the function of the Religious Education as debating religion, but not giving direction on any religious side. This position was an evolution of the first historical perspective more associated to the confessional catechesis. It also went beyond the former interpretation of an inter-confessional ecumenism, which kept the superiority of the Christianity over the other religions. As such, in this paper we adopt the argument that the decision of the Supreme Court, of six votes against five, is a reversal of what seemed to be a much more productive path on the Religious Education.Keywords: Religious Education. Brazilian Supreme Court. Confessional. Inter-confessional. Non- confessional.Enviado: 23-01-2018 - Aprovado e publicado: 12-2018


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-3) ◽  
pp. 70-81
Author(s):  
David Ramiro Troitino ◽  
Tanel Kerikmae ◽  
Olga Shumilo

This article highlights the role of Charles de Gaulle in the history of united post-war Europe, his approaches to the internal and foreign French policies, also vetoing the membership of the United Kingdom in the European Community. The authors describe the emergence of De Gaulle as a politician, his uneasy relationship with Roosevelt and Churchill during World War II, also the roots of developing a “nationalistic” approach to regional policy after the end of the war. The article also considers the emergence of the Common Agricultural Policy (hereinafter - CAP), one of Charles de Gaulle’s biggest achievements in foreign policy, and the reasons for the Fouchet Plan defeat.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (152) ◽  
pp. 92-99
Author(s):  
S. M. Geiko ◽  
◽  
O. D. Lauta

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the tropological theory of the history of H. White. The researcher claims that history is a specific kind of literature, and the historical works is the connection of a certain set of research and narrative operations. The first type of operation answers the question of why the event happened this way and not the other. The second operation is the social description, the narrative of events, the intellectual act of organizing the actual material. According to H. White, this is where the set of ideas and preferences of the researcher begin to work, mainly of a literary and historical nature. Explanations are the main mechanism that becomes the common thread of the narrative. The are implemented through using plot (romantic, satire, comic and tragic) and trope systems – the main stylistic forms of text organization (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony). The latter decisively influenced for result of the work historians. Historiographical style follows the tropological model, the selection of which is determined by the historian’s individual language practice. When the choice is made, the imagination is ready to create a narrative. Therefore, the historical understanding, according to H. White, can only be tropological. H. White proposes a new methodology for historical research. During the discourse, adequate speech is created to analyze historical phenomena, which the philosopher defines as prefigurative tropological movement. This is how history is revealed through the art of anthropology. Thus, H. White’s tropical history theory offers modern science f meaningful and metatheoretically significant. The structure of concepts on which the classification of historiographical styles can be based and the predictive function of philosophy regarding historical knowledge can be refined.


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