scholarly journals Value Pluralism and Public Ethics

Theoria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (160) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Derek Edyvane ◽  
Demetris Tillyris
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Bernard Williams ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Moral Universe ◽  
John Gray ◽  
Stuart Hampshire ◽  
Public Ethics ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. -Archilochus quoted in Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 22The fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus, quoted in Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, serves as a metaphor for the long-standing contrast and rivalry between two radically different approaches to public ethics, each of which is couched in a radically different vision of the structure of moral value. On the one hand, the way of the hedgehog corresponds to the creed of value monism, reflecting a faith in the ultimate unity of the moral universe and belief in the singularity, tidiness and completeness of moral and political purposes. On the other hand, the way of the fox corresponds to the nemesis of monism, the philosophical tradition of value pluralism, to which this collection of essays is devoted. This dissenting countermovement, which emerges most clearly in the writings of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams and John Gray, is fuelled by an appreciation of the perpetuity of plurality and conflict and, correspondingly, by the conviction that visions of moral unity and harmony are incoherent and implausible. In the view of the value pluralists, ‘there is no completeness and no perfection to be found in morality’ (Hampshire 1989a: 177).

Democracy and Value Pluralism

2000 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 255-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Galston
Keyword(s):  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Martha Nussbaum ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Bernard Williams ◽  
Moral Pluralism ◽  
Thomas Nagel ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
John Gray ◽  
Stuart Hampshire ◽  
The Relationship

My intention in this essay is to open up a question I cannot fully resolve: the relationship between democracy and value pluralism. By “value pluralism” I mean the view propounded so memorably by the late Isaiah Berlin and developed in various ways by thinkers including Stuart Hampshire, Steven Lukes, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Stocker, Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, John Kekes, and John Gray, among others. I shall define and discuss this view in some detail in Section III. For now, suffice it to say that value pluralism is the view that what we (rightly) value in our lives turns out to be multiple, heterogeneous, not reducible to a common measure, and not hierarchically ordered with a single dominant value or set of values binding on all persons in all circumstances. I use the phrase “value pluralism” rather than “moral pluralism” to indicate that this view encompasses nonmoral as well as moral goods.

scholarly journals 'Richly Imaginative Barbarism'

Theoria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (160) ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Derek Edyvane
Keyword(s):  
Political Conflict ◽  
Value Pluralism ◽  
Stuart Hampshire ◽  
Public Ethics ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
New Perspective

By way of an engagement with the thought of Stuart Hampshire and his account of the ‘normality of conflict’, this article articulates a novel distinction between two models of value pluralism. The first model identifies social and political conflict as the consequence of pluralism, whereas the second identifies pluralism as the consequence of social and political conflict. Failure to recognise this distinction leads to confusion about the implications of value pluralism for contemporary public ethics. The article illustrates this by considering the case of toleration. It contends that Hampshire’s model of pluralism offers a new perspective on the problem of toleration and illuminates a new way of thinking about the accommodation of diversity as ‘civility within conflict’.

scholarly journals The realistic and idealistic concept of substance: Kant and his predecessors

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-129
Author(s):  
Andrija Soc
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Philosophical System ◽  
Duns Scotus ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Continuity And Discontinuity ◽  
The Way

The main goal of this paper is to explore the continuity and discontinuity in how different philosophical systems understand the concept of substance. At the beginning of the paper, I draw a distinction between formal criteria for what it means to be a substance and the question of what satisfies those criteria. I then analyze Aristotle?s, medieval and modern views on substance in order to show that, in spite of other considerable differences among them, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Descartes, Locke and Hume all identify the same criteria for being the substenc. The differences between them, I then claim, lie in the way they answer the question of what satisfies the criteria. The most radical conclusion, as will be clear, is drawn by Hume, who famously believes that there is nothing that really satisfies traditional formal criteria for substantiality. In the last part of the paper, I analyze Kant?s idealist view and show that it is his only within his philosophical system that we can find a complete break with the philosophical tradition and quite differing criteria for substantiality. It will be shown that, for Kant, substance is no longer something that should be the basis for the properties of objects that exist independently of us, but the way in which human cognitive powers understand some key aspects of the phenomenological domain of the knowable. The upshot of this discussion is that the history of the idea of substance can be divided on the period before and after Kant, where it is Kant, rather than Descartes, the one who truly diverges from the traditional philosophical pardigms about substance.

The Art of Chinese Philosophy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Goldin
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Philosophy ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Current Form ◽  
Han Feizi ◽  
Textual History ◽  
Classical Chinese ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crucial Characteristic ◽  
The Way

This book provides an unmatched introduction to eight of the most important works of classical Chinese philosophy—the Analects of Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Sunzi, Xunzi, and Han Feizi. The book places these works in rich context that explains the origin and meaning of their compelling ideas. Because none of these classics was written in its current form by the author to whom it is attributed, the book begins by asking, “What are we reading?” and showing that understanding the textual history of the works enriches our appreciation of them. A chapter is devoted to each of the eight works, and the chapters are organized into three sections: “Philosophy of Heaven,” which looks at how the Analects, Mozi, and Mencius discuss, often skeptically, Heaven (tian) as a source of philosophical values; “Philosophy of the Way,” which addresses how Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Sunzi introduce the new concept of the Way (dao) to transcend the older paradigms; and “Two Titans at the End of an Age,” which examines how Xunzi and Han Feizi adapt the best ideas of the earlier thinkers for a coming imperial age. In addition, the book presents explanations of the protean and frequently misunderstood concept of qi—and of a crucial characteristic of Chinese philosophy, nondeductive reasoning. The result is an invaluable account of an endlessly fascinating and influential philosophical tradition.

Make Love at War? Representing Gender and Memory in the Soviet Estonian Film Dark Windows (Pimedad aknad, Tõnis Kask, 1968)

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Liis Jõhvik
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Moral Choices ◽  
The One ◽  
Falling In Love ◽  
The Way

Abstract Initially produced in 1968 as a three-part TV miniseries, and restored and re-edited in 2008 as a feature-length film, Dark Windows (Pimedad aknad, Tõnis Kask, Estonia) explores interpersonal relations and everyday life in September 1944, during the last days of Estonia’s occupation by Nazi Germany. The story focuses on two young women and the struggles they face in making moral choices and falling in love with righteous men. The one who slips up and falls in love with a Nazi is condemned and made to feel responsible for the national decay. This article explores how the category of gender becomes a marker in the way the film reconstructs and reconstitutes the images of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The article also discusses the re-appropriation process and analyses how re-editing relates to remembering of not only the filmmaking process and the wartime occupation, but also the Estonian women and how the ones who ‘slipped up’ are later reintegrated into the national narrative. Ultimately, the article seeks to understand how this film from the Soviet era is remembered as it becomes a part of Estonian national filmography.

Ibn-Ul-Arabi's Cultural Environment that Influenced Him

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 165
Author(s):  
Assist. Prof. Dr. Kazım Yıldırım
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
Ibn Rushd ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

The cultural environment of Ibn al-Arabi is in Andalusia, Spain today. There, on the one hand, Sufism, on the other hand, thinks like Ibn Bacce (Death.1138), Ibn Tufeyl (Death186), Ibn Rushd (Death.1198) and the knowledge and philosophy inherited by scholars, . Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240), that was the effect of all this; But more mystic (mystic) circles came out of the way. This work, written by Ibn al-Arabi's works (especially Futuhati Mekkiye), also contains a very small number of other relevant sources.

Emerson's Memory Loss

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Memory Loss ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Final Phase ◽  
Important Work ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

Historical Writing in the Balkans

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulf Brunnbauer
Keyword(s):  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
The Other ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Balkan Countries ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This chapter analyzes historiography in several Balkan countries, paying particular attention to the communist era on the one hand, and the post-1989–91 period on the other. When communists took power in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia in 1944–5, the discipline of history in these countries—with the exception of Albania—had already been institutionalized. The communists initially set about radically changing the way history was written in order to construct a more ideologically suitable past. In 1989–91, communist dictatorships came to an end in Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Years of war and ethnic cleansing would ensue in the former Yugoslavia. These upheavals impacted on historiography in different ways: on the one hand, the end of communist dictatorship brought freedom of expression; on the other hand, the region faced economic displacement.

Schopenhauer, Buddhism, and Compassion

2020 ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
Richard Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Metaphysical Explanation ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
Perfect Duties ◽  
Kantian View ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Way

The focus of this chapter is Schopenhauer’s On The Basis of Morality (1841). His distinctive views are that compassion marks one’s being as spontaneously motivated to relieve another’s suffering as one’s own and that this requires a metaphysical explanation for how one identifies with another. The author defends these views and shows in some detail how they mirror the Mahayana account of compassion in Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva. Next, the author outlines Schopenhauer’s case for compassion being the sole basis of moral value and defends this claim against the Kantian view that acting beneficently cannot (rationally) override so-called perfect duties to others. Finally, the author explores how Buddha Shakyamuni’s teachings cohere with Schopenhauer’s account of suffering and how mystical consciousness, as represented in Mahayana Buddhism’s “Middle Way,” coheres with Schopenhauer’s asceticism—the “denial of the will”—as the path to overcoming suffering.

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